There is something absorbingly abstract about C!erra My$t's art. You can grasp its gravity it with your senses but your mind may not be able to catch up with its consummate pull. This is true of their music as well as their design work. Both feel like the product of an iterative process of refinement with no end goal and no clear origin. At some interval, they both reach a sufficient stage of density and then are presented for exhibition via Bandcamp. I don't get the sense that C!erra My$t's work is ever totally finished, though- and that's what makes it so captivating. The entry point for every track on their latest release What A Sad Life seemingly via fissure and always in medias res. With each, there feels as though there is a reason you are there, why you have come to this place, but you won't be able to discover either motive or cause from the clues around you. Further, you will exit the track at a stage when the it deems ready to let you go- but these stops are always far from the conclusion of the journey you were on. Still, there is satisfaction in these obtuse collisions with permeable sound as well as the forced trespass and expulsion they usher you through. You get the sense of a life ever in motion from these processes- one glimpsed like the final parting glance of the sun above the top of a distant building as it retires at dusk- thin and evasive, but cuttingly bright. The selection of sounds used to validate these layered incursions work beautifully and congruently to establish the album's various and shifting moods- stalled and torqued vocal samples and hyper-expanded, mousse-textured synth hums insolate break beat splinters and shards in an ambrosia of suspended hostility and thawing ceasefire, interspersed by water-logged guitar solos, begging bleats of battered 8-bit sound cards, and snippets of dialogue from anime betraying various shades of ennui. It has a kind of natural elegance and inevitable force to, like water forming a cyclone around a drain. A mirror surfaced cylinder, rippling as it is pulled down a metal gullet and inhaled into the dark below, with you sitting in the catch at the center on a wad of toothpaste, dry as talcum but trapped and transfixed by the crude, unnerving marvel of it all. You are not in the drivers seat on What A Sad Life, but you are lucky to be along for the ride.
This album is available through Virtua94.