V1/V2 by Samara Lubelski

DAK024
Samara Lubelski-V1/V2 LP
Samara Lubelski builds delicate and intricate structures of webbed and sugary filigree but will also close her fist around a newly formed world just to watch what color it is when it oozes between her fingers. This music is the sound of becoming and unbecoming, of creation and destruction. The bow acts as an erase head on a tape machine in this context drawing half arcs that are then erased and redrawn with each stroke. Diving tones that circle back but to a new origin point and echo out endlessly. A Jim Starlin cosmos built of clusters and a kind of freeform geometry.

Though creeping and alien there is also something very lyrical about this music, a poetry of momentum and stasis. Every move seems to create its immediate opposite...patience/impatience, kinetic/fatigued, straight/curved, like opening a paper cutting to reveal its repeating shape but in a binary of opposition.

Vol 1 begins with our descent into a world that is new and chaotic. The accretion of delicate shapes and the chaos of young jagged landscapes. A core rising in temperature, forcing out bubbling and colorful liquids in explosions and dripping piles. While in the distance a gaseous horizon line percolates into nothingness.

With Vol 2 we start with something more settled.. while still alien and exploratory there is an eye towards terraforming. A sense that we could settle here in this place where the wind screams through towers of glistening plants while geysers of silver viscous liquid arc into the sky and freeze there. By the end a silver and mirrored thread has looped together the mutating present with the far off and unknown and we are both here and gone.

I hear in Vol 1 and 2 a stunning commitment to a liminality of sound. A denial of firm ground. It reminds me of "Nordic skating", the skaters that seek the black ice, the thinnest ice, to skate on. That's where the acoustic properties are the most beautiful and striking yet also where the most focus must be applied. Movement must be constant, not only to produce the sounds, but to avoid falling through.

--Bill Nace Philadelphia 2025

samaralubelski.com
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