Review: SHEDIR – Falling Time
There’s a track on Falling Time called “Skyness”, which translates as “the essence of what it means to be the sky”. The audio matches this premise perfectly: synthesisers carried upon the breeze, cloud-like bundles of bass frequency, white noise whooshing in panoramic circles. It’s a process of embodiment (or un-bodiment, perhaps). Throughout this album, I hear SHEDIR unravelling the edges of synthesisers and unfurling the centrality of human ego. She disperses breath and melody across the entirety of stereo space, obfuscating the placement of sounds to generate the illusion that they originate from everywhere at once, transforming currents of electricity into emulations of natural forces. And of course, without a stable reference through which to orientate myself, my listening experience becomes a process of shedding my own relationship to space. I, too, begin to occupy nowhere in particular, becoming a mere figment of the environment that SHEDIR brings into howling, blustering being.
Occasionally, there are beats that assert a vague, crumpled version of time – alternations of popping plosive and agitated nimbus static, or slurps of reverse that sound like someone smearing the sky with their hands. There’s a wonderful futility to these rhythmic devices. As they emerge and disappear, occasionally replaced by beats of a different speed and source material, their measurements obliterate themselves, casting me back out into a timelessness of vacant winds and orchestras at tampered speeds. And by blowing open space and knotting together the hands of countless clocks, SHEDIR leaves me stranded: floating within a mirror basin of space-time as mere concept, divorced from the very axes I use to assert my own existence within a somewhere and a somewhen. Like a world inverted.
