Review: Teresa Winter - Oh Tina, No Tina

For the opening three minutes of Oh Tina, No Tina, I’m carried upward in teleport of angelic voices and an expectant, high-speed piano refrain. I expect to be dropped up my arse at any moment, cracking my rump on the concrete of a pulsating house beat. It doesn’t happen. I keep on ascending, riding the updraft of part-formed melodious shapes, catching glimpses of Teresa Winter’s face in the clouds as she cycles through various anaesthesic sighs, brushing past looped glockenspiel and vaporised choir along the way. I feel liberated by how the album detonates itself across the sky, unified by harmonic and rhythmic implication that allows each element to drift, physically untethered, out of the frame and back in again.

My ears are popping by the time I rise to “Cannot Look”, which tilts between warm synthesiser chords with a Sunday morning nonchalance. “If you cannot look…” Winter sings, her sentence folding into its own echo. In fact, a lot of these pieces feel hazed by misremembering, as though someone has jolted my memory to an experience I had in a club two decades ago – I can remember the dazzling synthesiser pattern that projected itself upon the walls but not the beat beneath it, and I salvage what I can into a tatty memory of blurs and absences, undanceable but still bright and euphoric. As I climb further skyward, the memories become softer and less complete – they are shapeless sensations now, wafting through my head as gaseous recollections of colour and texture.