Artist:
Femina Faber
Overview:

Format:
CD
Additional Info.:
AMPLEXUM MENTIS - UT COSMO CONCORDENT VOCES- is the second album by FEMINA FABER a.k.a. Paola Bianchi, member of the band Ludmila for many years now and with a plethora of collaborations to her credit both within the experimental music scene and the "cultured" music milieu focused on Gregorian chant retrieval.

AMPLEXUM MENTIS (which means "mental embrace" in Latin) style is more cohesive and features a sound possibly reminiscent of German cosmic music, Lassigue Bendthaus-like digital nervatures and rustling drums à la Portishead and the voice as the gravitational kernel: as in cosmos every single particle is attracted and pushed away from a planet, so is every single instrument/sound/pulse in these tracks at times more adherent or more distant from the vocal line, immersed in (and never merely juxtaposed to) an electronic and electro-acoustic pointillistic flow getting constantly thicker or thinner according to the lyrics. The essential topic of this album is Love, not really referred to any physical person but rather intended as a universal feeling held in intentions and dreams, surreally described like a perfect, hypothetical soundtrack for a film by Lynch. This imagery is conveyed by the onomatopoeic use of Latin, resulting from the research of selectively evoking sounds; thanks to this process, this language, normally perceived as "dead", revives by becoming potentially universal: it rejuvenates, frees itself from any liturgical semantic superstructure and turns into a modern idiom, futuristic Esperanto, quintessence of all Romance languages musicality, meant to describe timeless, ever true events, no matter if they happen either many nautical miles away or just before our eyes. May the voice tune up with cosmos then: expect no frivolous vocal flourish, no soprano-like permissiveness from Paola Bianchi; her voice is a thick sound flow, capable of awakening mechanical mastodons from the ancestral sea bed of a surprisingly synthetic Atlantis. Femina Faber is a mermaid with an electronic soul, lying in wait for us in an ocean of entropy, showing us contradictions and passions, that is to say the humps and deep currents, marking that inconsistent navigation called real life: by singing she moves the spirit and changes it, just as the desert wind shaping sands into iridescent dunes.

Released late May 2012.

Track Listing:
01 Ne Me Demiseris
02 Ictus Libidinis
03 Parva Gemma Mea
04 In Mari Flamma
05 Amplexum Mentis
06 Formae Occultae
07 Emitte Spiritum Tuum (Inferum Visio)
08 Ne Me Demiseris (Effectio Mystica)
09 Inter Urticas Rosetum
10 Tenebrae Undique