Hirola - Hirola (2017) [Official Digital Download]

Occasionally a record falls into your lap and momentarily splices apart what you know as reality, exposes beyond as a luminous wound. Hirola’s eponymous debut, a mini-album released through Phantom Limb invites you into the space between things: a complex universe of bewildering scale, where the smallest molecule of dust might sparkle with the elemental grandeur of Jupiter. Listening to Hirola I’m easily seduced by these eerie landscapes, their intricacy and subtlety. Hirola comprise Bristol-based producers LTO (formerly of acclaimed electronic outfit Old Apparatus) and edapollo (signed as a solo act to Bad Banda and Svnset Waves). Sharing the production, LTO provides piano and edapollo vocals. Together, they spin a compositional latticework of ambient pleasure and classical flair. What grows out of this mingling is a solid, urgent set of songs, flirting with pop melody above esoteric groundwork and obscure mythology.

The word ‘hirola’ refers to a rare type of antelope, native to Kenya and Somalia and critically endangered. Hirola’s music bears the momentous sense of hurtling away from something, but within it there’s also a vulnerability: a retreat into warm, heartbeat soundscapes that teeter on the verge of abyss or extinction. It’s difficult not to feel utterly blown away by the complex layering that makes up a track like “Fields”, with gelatinous synths which pulse with dance-floor drama over hushes, whale cries and shimmering arpeggios. There’s an interesting trend for a sort of deconstructed pastoral in the current pop environment, from the playful shrills of Alt-J’s “Garden of England” interlude to the sinister warp-rock of These New Puritans’ “We Want War”, from their aptly-named 2013 album, Fields of Reeds. “Fields” paints a histrionic canvas of a haunted England, the sense of a climactic (read also: climatic) hurt throbbing underneath its vaudeville reverb, overlaid by woozy insect ticks. This is an England prone to flooding, freak weather and spooky mists: these “fields of scarecrows” aligning a petrified horizon on the brink of disaster “I lie awake here / until the storm comes in.”

“Hollow” bursts through with the energy of this storm, moving unpredictably to higher climes. Its slowly building synths, techno shivers and brooding pedals give rise to a murmured refrain: “Return to me.” As the chorus swells with exhilaration tricky to resist, vocals blurring into echoing cross rhythms, what dominates is less meaning than a visceral quality of mood: conveying a place where shadows expand then recede, where longing itself is supplanted by the increasing angst of its beat.

Where vocals loom in and out of focus, like someone adjusting the pitch on a vapourwave remix, sound meets its sweetest distortion. Some of the beats evoke Drexciya’s inward-spiralling, subaquatic disposition; but what Drexciya turn into darkly effervescent techno, Hirola make into lurid, addictive melodies owing as much to Thom Yorke’s crooning, tuneful sensitivity as to straight-up, white hot pop. Vocals fold like shuddering cries and you find yourself swept up in clicks and handclaps, the myriad distractions which accumulate their cyclonic, sonic debris.

Tracklist:

01. So Long
02. Fields
03. Hollow
04. Lonesome
05. Meliae
06. No Return



All thanks go to the original releaser