Published by Davide Pappalardo on May 18, 2018
Vena is the project of Italian duo Stefano Tocci (keybords) and Francesco Maggi (vocal e drum-machine), born in 1982 as an experimental dark/post-punk outfit. The two artists previously had played together in the techno-progressive projects Anft-Machine and Interference, and were not new to electronic music. Over the following years their music has evolved, and new musicians have arrived, Enzo Stante (guitar) during the first years, and recently Riccardo Martucci (keybords, noiser, vocoder). Darkwave, post-punk, synthwave, industrial, ambient, and much more are the genres touched by them, and with Ex Machina they offer a new voyage in the world of dark and eerie electronic music.
Deep rooted in the here and now, you won’t find in this work any retro elements or old-school nostalgia. Instead, we have a mysterious and lysergic atmosphere with occult and cosmic soundscapes, built upon crawling rhythms, grim ambiances and futuristic electronics. Trip-hop, post-punk, dark ambient, industrial, IDM, are used in work where the main theme is the evocation of dark landscapes in a distant future, in the deep space and/or the soul of a living machine.
For example, Avatar is built upon a minimal rhythm with obsessive motifs soon reached by dark-ambient sounds and shrilling samples. The, robotic spoken words complete the sci-fi atmosphere recalling the darker side of the genre, for example movies like Alien, Blade Runner or Dark City. Elohim is a totally different beast, with its militant drums and industrial incursions, a brooding but epic affair with majestic atmospheres and post-punk developments. There is a perfect union of darkness and almost orchestral epicness, but at the same time nothing ever explodes, instead the art of subtle tension is at the play.
Descent recalls the most intimate moments of Nine Inch Nails, thanks to slow guitar arpeggios and dreamy electronic, but the unsettling robotic vocals keep the darker side of their music. We can imagine the artificial entity meandering in its mind, pondering about its existence and developing dark and melancholic thoughts. Horizon evokes a distant galaxy made of distant roaring and creepy slow movements, a looping electronic number where spoken words are layered upon the mantra made of obsessive beats and riffing effects. Ascension is a dark ambient track with a slow building, starting with sparse cosmic sounds and sampled vocals, and then adding almost eerie and soothing chords and lines. It quietly proceeds until it lost itself in the nothingness, fading away.
Ex Machina is a fascinating album made of modern dark electronic music, a product of a project with a long history, but without any fear to sound contemporary and explore the possibilities of new technologies and genres. They manage to evoke emotions without deploying human elements, instead giving us a world where synthetic life is the protagonist of an imaginary sci-fi tale with no clear plot. We are invited to follow the trails and develop our own story, guided by experimental but coherent electronic passages in which every track has its own identity. Recommended for the listener wanting a true sonic experience.
Label: self-released
Rate: 8