New Item is the debut album of Italonesian duo Arcibanda, composed of producers and musicians Roberto Chiurazzi and Kevin Silalahi (BAPAK, whoosah). With a unique attention to, and allure for, band-oriented approaches to digi-organic sound design and composition, the pair delivers nine tracks of pure, outbursting instrumental joy, traversing diverse constellations of sonic references and shifting across eras in ways that never feel tacky, as expert masters of their craft. Drawing inspiration from the low-poly realms of early Japanese surrealist exploration games such as those by Osamu Sato, Garage Bad Dream Adventure, and the art of collectives like Jikken Kōbō, Arcibanda’s narrative style feels like an ideal reflection of such liminal atmospheres and abstract landscapes. Their aural fabric is animated with lively characters and voices, orchestras of not-yet-existing wind instruments, ever-shifting textures, and arpeggiators firing off tapestries of dreamlike, interwoven counterpoints. 

Though the music carries its own strain of exoticism, what Arcibanda highlights is never the crude imitation of a geographical setting and its cultures. The tone, reminiscent of timbral explorations by artists across Asia, consistently opens onto independent realms of speculation. Much like in the works of Henry Kawahara or projects such as Fatum Betula, the focus lies on a radical mapping of fictional domains, creatures, and terrains, supported by a portal-like use of digital technologies leading deep into the musicians’ imagination. This New Item in your inventory functions as a device revealing bonus levels filled with friendly singing androids, enhanced spiritualities, hyperreal flora and fruit, and non-Euclidean fables.

With New Item, Arcibanda sends polygons and vectors racing through your amygdala and opens new rooms in your cochlea, unflattening the landscape and gently collapsing multiple dimensions - the natural, the traditional, the technological, and the virtual - into one another. Fictional figures are jolted into being, and each time what first appears to be harmless arrangement and instrumentation reveals richer harmonic and rhythmic strata: an endless process of self-discovery within the duo’s imaginative cosmos. While it could be catalogued as a product of its musical zeitgeist, resonating with Orange Milk and EM Records icons as well as Visible Cloaks, what the duo grasps so precisely - and unlike many similar projects - is the emphasis on the song form. Each piece emerges as an ode to this larger universe: the soundtrack to a specific level, a gathering of peculiar multidimensional beings that we stumble upon by chance, yet a place where we feel strangely at home. What are you waiting for? Press start and surf the uncanny valley.