Phiorio - The Perpetual Self Doubt

Label: Depths - DEPTHS005CS
Format: Cassette, Album, Stereo
Country: UK
Released: Dec 8, 2023
Genre: Electronic
Style: Ambient, Electronica, Experimental

Brand new album - and fresh new sonic approach - from Metroline Records co-founder and veteran minimal techno producer Phiorio.

In a world - and an era - of much uncertainty and restriction, Phiorio took a step sideways, looking away from the somewhat rigid ‘rules’ of electronic club music - the prescribed BPMs, the restrictive palette of sounds, the universally agreed formula of minimal techno - to produce his most personal and surprising work in years.

A bold new freedom was acquired in discarding the safety net of structural familiarity - the cold surgical steel of precision-made techno is here replaced with more atmospheric, woozy and smudged aesthetic. There’s still percussion, but of a looser, more organic, less mechanistic flavour. The music is still propulsive, but not so much a futuristic shining chromium monorail, more of a late-night drive, an automotive drift through an unlit and slightly foreboding landscape.

Nocturnal melodies, half-recalled memories, late night visions, cold sweats - The Perpetual Self Doubt is an enigmatic fever dream populated by fluttering synths, corporeal basslines, wraithlike half-heard voices, ghost drones, miasmic echoes and ambiguous atmospheres.

In a similar manner to antecedents Drexciya with their aquatic afrofuturist aesthetic or Wolfgang Voigt’s GASeous frozen Bavarian forests, Phiorio – for all his self-deprecating self-doubt – has impressively and confidently created his own sonic universe, his own cinema-of-the-mind, an intimate and singular authorial voice.

It is at times a disquieting and eerie journey to embark upon, but it is a journey you’ll want to take again and again, hearing (and possibly hallucinating) new facets and details with every listen.

1. Doubt
2. Storm
3. Hanging
4. Believe
5. Evil 247
6. My Memory
7. Somewhere Else
8. Nemesis
9. Spark