The new compilation released on Left Ear is pretty STROOM~~-ish: cassette synth-pop from the eighties and the bedroom, recorded by lovers, which is true of both performers – Bruno De Angelis and Giovanna Gulinello – and recipients – a select few. In its downbeatness and dubbed-in-ness the sound of Influenza Prods. evokes Saskia or Jan Van Den Broeke. You can hear from the drum machine that it wasn’t expensive, and it quickly becomes clear that the mastering simply consisted of moving the tracks once or twice from one cassette to the another until the sound had the right amount of grit and noise. Add to that a bit of bass, a bit of guitar, slowly chugging synths and Gulinello’s sleepy talk. Done. Perfect anti-activation music. In keeping with the subject matter, such music quickly becomes tiring, which is fortunately not the case here. The multilingualism, Italian, English, Croatian, Romanian (?), and the sequencing of the compilation, where audible care was taken to leave enough space between pieces with similar moods, helps. »Mémoire« would have landed on an oversaturated market in 2017. At this point in time, however, the moment really has come for this type of sound again.
Memoire
