Paris-based QuinzeQuinze have tasked themselves with constructing a connective sonic tributary to permit fresh streams of electronic refrain to find safe passage to the rejuvenating mother-seas from which spring the traditional Polynesian music that is their heritage. They've been immersed in the project for close to a decade and have at least three impressive EPs to show for their efforts, of which Vārua is the latest, as well as my introduction to their work. While there appears to be a connection between QuinzeQuinze's sound and some popular French Polynesian dance genres like ori deck, the presence of such influences seems tangential to the facts of its anatomy. It seems rather focused on the cultivation and maintenance of a shared and overriding tenor of introspective climate and living harmonies. A general preoccupation with the metabolism of mood over the insistence of motion. Vārua is simple in structure but mighty in impact- conjuring a throne of hushed thunderclouds and a drift of elemental electronics from which a commanding quiet usher forth, guided by slick, bassy jetstream torrents and fertile reservoirs of marrowy percussion and ringing, concave drums that form the hutch and temple floor for a vocal performance that is both familiar and guarded, like the diffuse agony of lost memories surging back to conscious recollection without warning. Vārua is truly the proper title for this EP, and not without reason. The word translates to "spirit" in Tahitian, a concept which it embodies fully as it prompts you to grasp at its shifting and ethereal forms only to have them pass through your fingers like smoke. And yet it produces an aura that is more than just a phantom, a total manifestation of concrete sensation that creeps up your spine like a disembodied hand to rest, in a warm gripping embrace, on your shoulder. A presence of reassurance and weighted doubt that can't be ignored.
