The Wire (Aprile 2006)
28-12-2006
The music of italian quintet Medves for the most part drifts untethered, floating in its own rarefied space. But if the initial impression is one of tasteful abstraction, a gentle unravelling of elements, these guitar-led compositions occasionally touch on a surprising intensity brought on by gradual increased and sustained noise levels. Opening with a hesitant round of seemingly random guitar notes, punctuated by muffled bass booms and stray crackles, the music stumbles into semi-cohesion with overlapping guitar chimes before gently fading out. The following piece - all tracks are untitled - again marks out its territory with the plucking of guitar strings in Ambient space, but gradually grows into an atonal surge, a wave of sound within wich individual elements are sharply drawn but are then absorbed into a mass of abstract noise. What follows is a short interlude of jazzy, twanging guitar and stark piano before the drawn out climax of the album's fourth and final track. This begin with a muffled clunk of percussion accompanying raga-like guitar and a burgeoning acoustic drone. Clearer guitar sounds make tracks through the embedded noise with muted volleys of notes and short bursts of feedback. Frequently the group skirt around melodic themes with a teasing sense of semiengagement as the gitars' clarity wavers then fades back into the murky backdrop of noise. The way it finally peters out is in keeping with the disc's generalimpression of sketchy elusiveness that's intriguing if not terribly substantial.
Tom Ridge
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Andrea Belfi
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