Luciane Cardassi - Going North [Redshift Records]

Scheduled for release on October 30th, 2k20 via Redshift Records is "Going North", the forthcoming album by praised and awarded long-standing Brazilian-Canadian piano player Luciane Cardassi who's released her debut "Preludios Em Porto Alegre" back in 1998 and has been making waves on the classical and experimental music circuit ever since. On her new album she employs her natural combination of piano and vocals alongside additional electronic enhancements to present a total of eight compositions by both Canadian and Brazilian composers, amongst them the likes of Darren Miller, Emilie Lebel, Chantale Laplante and Terri Hron. Opening with a take on Hron's 12+ minutes spanning "Ahojahoj" the listener is immediately drawn in by a well haunted, dark intro sequence and soon starts to explore a well Noir combination of haunting electronic atmospheres, twisted vocals and samples with a more documentalist feel alongside spatial, yet minimalist piano manipulations going well beyond the use of keys, strings and hammers whilst the second piece "Dois Afrorismos Com Interludio" by Jorge Villavicencio Grossmann provides more of a playful, (Neo)Classical-leaning exercise in dramatic piano minimalism. Furthermore Emilie Lebel's "Wonder" sees Luciane Cardassi dive into a world of heavy chords, plucked, chiming strings, frolicking high notes and beautifully scenic Spoken Word poetry, Alexandre Espinheira's "Berimbau" focuses on a surprisingly tense and brooding, danger-heralding vibe inherent to its buzzing, fast changing sonic eruptions and multi-layered, echoing vocal repetetions whilst the stripped "Estudo De Um Piano" by Chantale Laplante amalgamates echoes of echoes of electroacoustic composition with a well Morricone'esque tension and therefore turns out to be our favorite cut on this longplayer. The subsequent "For Will Robbins" by Darren Miller presents a late night deep listening exercise in silence and response, "Converse", a collaborative composition by Lia Sfoggia, Guilherme Bertissolo and Luciane Cardassi herself, is a spatial, and slightly space-themed, ever spiralling flow of Contemporary Piano Classical and the concluding Fernando Mattos piece "The Boat Sings" waves goodbye in a well twisted and brooding manner with its sparse, nightly and inward looking, somewhat subdued minor tones and off-kilter string manipulations. A thrilling vision of Contemporary Classical Music, this.

Album artwork on Instagram!