Review: Pascal Savy - Liminal

A purchase of Liminal comes with a choice of one of four poems, each sharing its title with one of the EP’s four tracks. A consistent theme across the poetry is the writer’s dissociation with the physical world as he places himself right on the seam between reality and dream state, questioning the significance of life in the grand scheme of the universe. It feels like an act of escaping one’s self to look down on one’s self: an epiphany-jolt of perspective through which life’s thread of personal experiences ultimately enlighten us to so little.

The music itself shares this sense of disconnection with the corporeal. Electronic layers move restlessly to form blurred images: kaleidoscopic collages of light that constantly flicker between shapes, with each composition acting as a four-minute snapshot of eternally transient states. Static and high pitch beeps add agitated surges of electricity to the music’s gooey warmth, disrupting what would otherwise place Liminal alongside very natural and organic connotations.

Initially I was tempted to cite Andrew Chalk as a similar artist, but there’s something very ambiguous about Savy’s music that evades the evocation of distinct landscape. Whereas the ambience of Chalk paints hazy pictures of green fields and billowing, cloudy skies, Liminal is the sound of nowhere, and comes to a close before that very “nowhere” can come to represent a “somewhere” in itself. Sonically, there’s not a great deal here to distinguish Savy from other artists working in introspective ambient forms, but there’s something rather curious about its mood that makes it jut out from its contemporaries ever so slightly.