Review: Camilla Pisani – Phant[as]

The tones spill, bleed outward from a single point, covering all corners now, subdividing into echo-drenched waves, then chattering synth arpeggiations, then voices splashing against the walls of an underpass. Camilla Pisani extrapolates a single dark sentiment, amplifies the hard fact, into something fantastical, edgeless. It's considerably less horrible now that it's on the outside with the sun streaming through it. The album centres on fears and inner struggles, as rendered through the inspiration of the 18th century theatre form known as phantasmagoria: a sensory teem of lights, smoke and demonic images projected onto walls and sheets. In its sheer scale and whirling, tendrillic complexity, Phant[as] posits that it is untenable for the body to retain so much darkness. This is about agency. Pisani projects her interior world onto the walls and floors, albeit as evaporated techno rather than as ghouls – the electronic beats like flashing strobes, noise dispersed like smoke – yet crucially she does so of her own volition. Just as phantasmagoria offers a controlled environment in which to let out the sinister energies that accumulate within all of us, Phant[as] is a slow purge of turmoil that would only burst beyond the body eventually anyway. And so the record manifests not as an eruption, but with the grace of unfurling blackened flowers. The pattering electronics seem to be actively moderating the intensity, keeping any melodies reduced to the patient circulation of synth loops, and any voices to subdued utterances, spreading the energy over 70 slow-release minutes. It makes sense that Pisani finds affinity with ghosts and projected demons; Phant[as] is full of peripheral and somewhat elegant manifestations of darkness, possessing the bear minimum of shape to be discernible as that original inner gloom before splaying into formlessness.