Perila - On the Corner of the Day (2023)

Amassing a dozen or so releases over the last 4 years for Sferic, Smalltown Supersound, The Trilogy Tapes, Motion Ward, Paralaxe Editions and our own Documenting Sound, Perila’s prolific output has been fuelled by a restless development of ideas and techniques that now finally brings her to the esteemed Shelter Press label, for which she assembles an engrossing suite of quietly experimental wonders.

Recorded during a residency at ‘Maison Salvan’ in a little town outside Toulouse, ‘On The Corner Of The Day’ vividly conjures that elusive feeling of getting away from the daily routine, of life in suspension. Moving further away from explicitly electronic dimensions, the opening winds a gong soundbath around Perila’s vocal narration, applied at a distance, designed to soothe. Through eight parts, she proceeds to bloom from metallic sound poems to laminal concrète with a quiet and deliciously heatsick logic that turns the slow-baked atmosphere of her environment into iridescent postcard snapshots that appear to shimmer and sway like dappled shadows.

It’s her most amorphous and precise yet freely sketched work to date, suspending disbelief thru a skin-touch sensitivity and near-olfactory level of synaesthesia. The frothed choral baubles of ‘Dropping Closely at First Light’, and sublime traces of early ‘80s new age private pressings in ‘Elastic Stitches Gracefully in Making’, only make the voluminous mixing of ‘Window Frame Lisergic’ trippier in relief. ‘Scivia’ follows with a strange presence that pairs sinuous bass muscularity with barely there, OOBE-like impressionism, and ‘Decision to Out and Onwards’ feels as though we’re carried thru the window by the breeze to the aerial shoegaze shimmers of ‘Estimated to Savage’.

The whole thing runs like a dream, one with inexplicable healing properties.