ctm: red dragon

"about/ a (feverish) narrative involving/ touching upon Elon Musk's (cancelled/) failed robotic lander mission to mars, Michael Jackson's final moments on stage and current personal life (motherhood)" Search as one might for an adequate charm to safely light Red Dragon, Cæcilie Trier's evocations tend to outpace us at every step. The album's fever-dream story flicks through the recent past and the present. Elon Musk's extraplanetary desires cross with maternal notes. Michael Jackson, too, is watched over. The terse titles that greet us in Trier's solo work are a wry sleight of hand. CTM, standing for Cæcilie Trier Musik, marks the impersonal boundary where intimacies are developed, trampled, and searched through. On her new album for Posh Isolation, produced with Asger Hartvig, aka MC Boli of Boli Group, the drama is composed and enduring, like a plot twist that lasts a life time. Trier is a Copenhagen based cellist, singer, and composer, with her classical training apparent across her many and varied projects and collaborations. Having received critical acclaim from the earliest moments of her career, Trier's previous album Suite For A Young Girl (2016) was nominated for the prestigious Nordic Music Prize in 2017. Red Dragon keeps Trier's voice central to the affairs. The instrumentation wades in-and-out of focus from stage right and left. And as often as you are caught in the songwriting's pirouettes and glances around the vocals, the splintering effect of the production impresses an inhuman déjà vu with regularity. This is especially felt in the electronics, sound bites, and digital ephemera that dress the songs. The bareness of the strings and guitars act as a peculiar balance, keeping you close just as you get a sense of the distance from which you are permitted a view. Red Dragon features appearances from Coco O, Frederikke Hoffmeier (Puce Mary), Soho Rezanejad, and Dawda Jobarteh.