Hypermnesiac

THE SOMNAMBULIST is the project of a fluid international collective
of musicians whose unique and ever-changing approach to their work,
which defies any easy classification or assignment to a specific genre,
freely embraces the transient and infinite nature inherent to music and
art in general.
After Moda Borderline (2010), Sophia Verloren (2012) and Quantum
Porn (2017), Marco Bianciardi (vocals, guitar), Thomas Kolarczyk
(bass) and Leon Griese (drums) are now introducing Hypermnesiac,
their fourth studio album, released by the band's own label Slowing
Records. And it's probably their most significant record so far.
The band sounds as tight as ever, relying on a tense and dynamic
interplay between the three musicians, while refining their innovative
language, which has never before come as close to the core of their
artistic research. And yet – while retaining the courage, tension and
sense of fracture typical of their previous works – Hypermnesiac is
more accessible thanks to a new synthesis that gets to the point with
unprecedented efficacy.
THE SOMNAMBULIST continue to be characterized by their
meticulous, determined and febrile explorations. With Hypermnesiac,
they achieve a sound capable of representing a swerve, a shake, a
look into the crack. Over the span of 40 minutes, the profound and
multifaceted voice of Marco Bianciardi ventures into the territory of
new wave turmoils, industrial chewings, jazz dislocations and funk
tremors in a way that is highly cinematic, willingly overstepping
boundaries which nevertheless become strained by a shadowy, yet
blazing, flood of feelings.
The dystopian spinning of Film and the math ballad No Use for More,
the psychic disarray of At Least One Point at Which It Is
Unfathomable (a title that quotes a footnote in Freud's Interpretation
of Dreams), the emotional distress of Doubleflower and Tom's Still
Waiting, the snarling edges and the bitterness of No Sleep Until
Heaven, and lastly the jazz meditation which progressively goes up in
flames of Ten Thousand Miles Longer (both a prequel and sequel to a
song already featured in their previous album): this, as a rough
approximation in a nutshell, is the blistering material of a record
which, with repeated playing, seems to both reveal and conceal, like
a code constantly reproducing its own secret.
Hypermnesiac places in the firing line, and without rhetoric, an aspect
of crisis of our present condition: the rift in the thin layer of ice
between human and post-human, in which the excess of memory
(hypermnesia, indeed) is the standard pathological condition, a
reiterated trauma that renders chronic the impossibility of tracing a
perimeter of the self, the boundary between who we are and who we
don’t want to be. It's just not a damn good record: it's an important
one. An album that sets out to talk about our current times. It's rock
music in its true essence: a scission of feeling, a discontinuity at the
very heart of what we take as understood, accepted, consolidated. If
there is a road for rock music to come back to speaking to us with its
former strength, it'll pass through records like this one.