A first rate illustration of growing musical ambition and inventiveness. The sparingly-used vocals enhance the instrumentation that, itself, moves between the minimal and the more full-blooded. It’s a record of successful explorations of musical avenues. The languid piano introducing “The Divided City” leads to an arresting, wholly-convincing swerve in the strings that, in turn, dies away before the rhythm picks up in the following track emphasising strings more fully, and then a delightful Bach-style cello theme brings in “There Is One of Which You Never Speak” collapsing into a fierce electrical sizzle. The consistent delicacy of Dustin O’Halloran’s piano often contrasts with some threatening industrial-type effects or thunderous orchestral surges. That ambiguous area between the factual and the fictional is suggested from the outset on this album, as the swelling instrumental of the (significantly titled) “So That the City Can Begin to Exist” gives way to an angelic eight-voice choir sound of “The Celestial City” against a slightly discordant pulsing rhythm an uneasy balance of the kind that is so well handled across the record. This is echoed here, with the introduction of sound effects that are always interesting and never gratuitous, as they take themes and ideas in original directions. Calvino’s literary style is unorthodox, rarely offering a traditionally linear narrative instead, favouring structures and register shifts that call into question his readers’ usual assumptions. A Winged Victory for the Sullen, the composer collaboration between Stars of the Lid founder Adam Wiltzie and LA composer Dustin OHalloran, composed ‘Invisible Cities’ as the stunning score to the critically acclaimed theatre production of the same name. Such deliberately unsettling intrusions testify to AWVFTS’s willingness to go further beyond the more immersive that was a dominant characteristic of their earliest recordings. So, appropriately enough, “Thirteenth Century Travelogue” suggests a contrast between the real and the imagined (or between the genuine and the fraudulent), as the ambient texture is cross-cut by a slightly sinister metallic sound that uneasily breaks up the underlying majestic harmonies. Incorporating a wash of eerie synths, beguiling string arrangements, limpid piano and uplifting choral vocals, AWVFTS’s latest venture deftly bridges the worlds of ambient tone-poem, neo-classical and post-rock with a consummate command of emotion and a mastery of sonic architecture.The recognisable wide-angle instrumental soundscape now incorporates some intelligently-arranged vocal elements at key points, serving well to convey contrast and dramatic effects arising out of Marco Polo’s verbal images which have long exercised scholars’ views on the disputed matter of their truthfulness. On the stately, Bach-inspired There is One of Which You Never Speak, the Stars Of The Lid founder and the seasoned soundtrack composer pair a low cello and piano to haunting effect, whilst Despair Dialogue mines the tranquillity of warm synth clusters whilst toying with bleary shards of static noise. The sumptuous, cinematic and melancholy So That The City Can Begin To Exist opens the record with a doleful piano figure and dazzling synths, whilst the shape-shifting The Celestial City features dizzying swells of brass, distorted textures and angelic choral refrains that transport the listener to immersive captivation. Where Calvino’s literary style is discursive and rarely offers a linear narrative, so too AWVFTS peddle a musical alchemy that dispenses with any straightforward rock structures and revels in sudden and unexpected shifts in texture. The pair’s dreamy and regal soundscapes and the book’s elegant, postmodernist inquiry make for perfect companions, both engendering passion and fascination in equal measure. Helmed by theatre producer and video designer Leo Warner, Invisible Cities is part of a multi-media stage show interpretation of Italo Calvino’s 1972 novel of the same name that received its premiere in 2019 at the Manchester International Festival.
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