paraadiso: unison

TSVI & Seven Orbits debut their Paraadiso project with a whorl of sweeping choral arrangements and staggering rhythms for Shanghai’s SVBKVLT powerhouse. Inspired by Italian folk music, noise, ancient compositions and rituals, the result is a sort of widescreen 4D soundworld, something like Enigma/FSOL’s ‘Lifeforms’ bolstered by smashed/syncopated hard drums and emo arpeggios rendered in slow motion. ‘Unison’ is the duo’s conception of ritual music for contemporary, collective physical experience, aka the rave. With a masterful grasp of technoid dramaturgy, its 10 tracks draw on ancient choral traditions as much as up-to-the-second rhythmic diffusion styles to suggest new ways of moving and being moved, with a pointed focus on synchronising social action and reaction. Following their 2020 debut, Seven Orbits approaches the project from an audio-visual background, bringing a highly animated structure to TSVI’s rugged rhythmic proprioceptions. ‘Unison’ was created by the pair to be performed in live context with visual accompaniment, and clearly conveys a strong sense of movement through the audio alone, coming close to the kind of balletic dynamics of Jlin and Second Woman. For the strongest examples we advise checking the lush choral lather and polymetric slosh of ‘Liquid Matter’ finding the duo at their most uplifting, the knuckled scuzz of ‘Berserk’ for their rudest workout, or the killer arrangement of haunting ancient chorales and bombed out dembow swag in ‘Riflesso,’ coming off like Laszlo Hortobagyi meets Paul Marmota at their darkest and most theatric.