This debut from Alina Kalancea comes out of a six-year period of experimentation with electronics and voice. Through a series of collaborations, stage performances and studio sessions, the Romanian artist says she has been working to develop a sound she can call her own. In this sense, The 5^th Apple is more than just a first recording. It’s a fully realized, 53-minute artistic mission statement.

Along the way, Kalancea has studied with Enrico Cosimi, professor of electronic music at the University of Rome Tor Vergata. She’s also worked with Steven Thomas, a professor of physics at Queen Mary University in London and an artist familiar to BADD PRESS readers, Alex Gámez (a.k.a. Asférico). Gámez runs the Störung label and studio in Barcelona, where The 5^th Apple was recorded.

It is a haunting, nuanced, occasionally anxious work. It is primarily, but not exclusively electronic. (We also get a lovely cello contribution by Julia Kent and strings by Raven Bush.) Layered over top of all this sophistication, spoken-word pieces showcase Kalancea as a talented poet.

The album opens with a piece of writing called “Imbalance:”

Tragedies happen on the sly

they slither along the soul and build their nest inside it

they conceal monsters

darkness

 

infernal screams mixed with frightful silences and disturbing cries

every time you get out of it

you are wordless

doubtful

 

and hardly pluck up the courage to give out a sound as if you have to come into the world again

and redo the whole journey from start to finish

but you are deranged right from the start

a cruel fate

 

if it has reason to be

this is how we become real jars full of buried suppressed emotions

hermetically sealed

this is how we find ourselves exchanging a few banal and meaningless words

 

while our hands touch each other

at the mercy of an aseptic feeling that we are not able to tear apart…

a gory passion

 

glare in your eyes and that lump in your throat going up and down

the desire consuming its resources and crushing its own creation

all that pushed inside until reaching the incredible barriers, containing all this awe-inspiring desire and hold it back

our well-known barriers made up of fear

the revolution

 

a trivial, worthless revolution

a revolution that increases lives to offer them to death

while this life tends to extend blindly in a wastefulness that is directly proportional to the uselessness of the effort

the more we give, the less we have

imbalance is the only privilege we have

Dark, yes. But this is no gothic pose. Kalancea has produced a deeply relatable work of audio art. While The 5^th Apple dropped Dec. 21, for me it is the first great release of the new year.

Kevin Press