Cucina Povera - Zoom (2019)

After blessing Night School with the divine ambient pop of ‘Hilja’ - one of 2018’s most memorable albums - Cucina Povera turns us to mush again with ‘Zoom’, her 2nd side of plaintive choral hooks, murmuring vocals, and super minimal synth strokes

Recorded through a VE20 vocal effects pedal directly into a Zoom H2N in Autumn / Winter 2016, ‘Zoom’ is more stripped down than Cucina Povera’s debut, literally breaking down to glossolalic gasps, single words and phonemes that drift in mellifluous cadence thru gently reverberant space.

Occasionally her vocals form full phrases, but they’re in Finnish so we can’t understand what she’s saying anyway. But the information is really all imparted via her plaintive intonation and harmonic structuring. In this sense she beautifully lives up to her moniker - a style of Southern Italian make-do cooking - as she almost purely relies on what’s to hand - her vocals - in simple, but properly unusual and new combinations.