S.P.N

Tip! Turin is a city of crumbing facades and fading surfaces. A memorial to regal splendour and industrial boom. Behind every door is a different world. Pass through a grand double-door in the southern part of the city into a quiet courtyard, through into a small room with a high ceiling and cracked white coving. The room holds a modest studio set up, everything laid out as if the occupant just left. It’s a workshop, littered with blank cassettes, sepia-tinted journals and unidentified family scrapbooks. This is where Esse Pi Enne works to graft sounds from the past onto the present moment. 

The record opens with church bells ringing and the sounds of the markets waking up against tentatively picked open strings. Layers are added, a single bass note and the sound of the room, a thudding rhythm coalescing into half a song sung in shy, introverted voice reminiscent of bands you forgot you even liked. It’s a record of simple yet peculiar arrangements, space is left for questions to form. Blunt sounds and radio static from another place and time, histories merge without explanation. Chamber music is a fitting title for music that feels introverted, domestic and out of sight, it’s charm lies in its mystery, tangents and touch-points left unexplained.

Its unintentionally aloof yet occasionally tender. A product of its Piedmont surroundings yet mixed in Manchester for extra glum, evocative of Klang, mid-period Fall, Mickeranno, Pink Reason, A.C Marias, Pickle Factory and Call Back The Giants. Chamber music opens up the door but leaves us guessing.