Equal parts sound installation and symphony, Christina Vantzou’s new album No. 1 feels more at home in an art gallery than a concert hall. Originally a visual artist, Vantzou formed The Dead Texan with Adam Wiltzie to create ambient audiovisual compositions. Here, she collaborates with Minna Choi and Magik*Magik, a “modular orchestra” based in San Francisco, in music that spins out shimmering textures and pulsing feedback waves, blurring the lines between acoustic and electric, sampled and live. The tracks tend to blur into a single wash of sound as well, despite their clever titles (“Your Changes Have Been Submitted,” “And Instantly Take Effect”). No. 1 feels tuned to your slowest delta-phase brainwaves, and the synthesized sheen occasionally threatens to drift off into New Age kitsch; and yet there is surely some dream-like logic to be found in these arcing swells and glacial developments, like a slow-motion telegraph from the fifth dimension.
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