THE IMAGES WITHIN (OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZijFv-qjms
UNRAVEL (OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVthWPmNxCE
The signs were always there, for anyone who’s cared to hear. Xhin’s heterogeneous sounds always contained the signs of something, somewhere else. The multi-instrumentalist has, over the last two decades, low-key infused his electronic music and mixes with compositional flourishes, ambient touches, and live instrumentation. Finally, The Images Within — less a return to Xhin’s roots than a solo fulfilment of long-held, diverse desires; his true colours — offers an entry into his holistically experimental, analogue, and very human world. Incited by mortality’s harsh confrontation of us, his first album on his own label — The Document — may shock or alienate, but its intensely visual poetry of the medieval and antiquarian, its song cycles between and within genres, its independent core of melancholy and necessary catharsis: they are all, as ever, open to anyone who cares to step in.
Mastered by Christian Wright at Abbey Road Studios, the eight tracks within are akin to a soundtrack in search of a film — something by Villeneuve or Lynch, perhaps, on a double bill with Ōshima or Toshio Matsumoto. Opener “This Is Not The Beginning”, unlike a tabula rasa, does not demolish but builds upon, further expands Xhin’s sound stage. Literally: the undulating static and metallic sheens wildly oscillate between the channels and surround; hints of nonhuman growls may make you check your speakers too. From the factory to a field, this mic check/drop takes off into “Hyperion”, variously referencing the Greek Titan of the sun, Saturn’s irregular moon, and a spent, earth-imaging satellite. The dramatically rising movement here, laced with insectile low-ends, recalls wide open vistas and ambition’s heights, so easily cut down like with Icarus, but so worth trying to reach, especially nowadays (“We’ve all got to start somewhere”). Strings enter on the titular track — an emotional, eight-minute monolith — and build up towards a saturnine crescendo of sandworm sound/landscapes, an internal cascade of human passion. Of a piece with the promise and pain of “The Images Within” is “Illumina”. On the verge of Side B, its contemporary classical fades in and out of shoegaze-y feedback, pulled back at points by the thick sludge, pulling through eventually with a circular, light-filled refrain.
On the other side, flinty crawler “Unravel” pounds and coaxes its way into the amygdala courtesy of effected field recordings, here and elsewhere. Probably his (initially) prettiest track, “Sea of Deceit” unabashedly showcases Xhin’s ear for melody and sensitivity to sound — in all its concert beauty and body horror. Clocking in at just four minutes, the movement brings us through the depth of worlds, or a war, displaying the composer’s pop-like sensibility for the hook, first and foremost. “No Consolation” is very Tarkovsky’s Stalker meets goth, a song of mysteriously falling things, hard pauses, and gentle, recuperative strings. This sense of balance — the blue and the black — carries over to “Perennial” and carries on Xhin’s signature album conclusions. Its immersive ambience is a palate cleanser, an atmosphere of recovered possibilities. Assiduously surpassing the weight of influences, this realisation of a full album is equal parts liberating and challenging, inspiring through its direct facing of selves. Like looking out into the polluted night sky only to see, through a glass darkly, some faint, dying stars, this collection of light bounces back into eyes, burns itself upon celluloid minds in deep black and blazing white.
- Dan Koh