vanessa amara: manos

Cut from the same cloth as 2017's double-cassette, Like All Mornings, Vanessa Amara's new album, Manos, trails shorthand piano pieces and wilted strings through magnificent, electro-acoustic sounds, often settling into buzzing, syncopated reveries. Their new album feels hesitant to reveal its parts and is perhaps a document of the limits of what can be revealed, a memorial to its own process as it winds itself in and around its delicately hued landscape. Though beginning with a morose gait, the album quickly turns over. And revealing its softer self, the clarity of the moving string arrangements hang in the air like fine mist. Everything settles against surfaces as the day breaks, opening up the space, though eventually condensing into the unnerving crescendo of the album's final piece. A recurrent, gentle whirring, much like a gramophone's needle, tracks through much of Manos. It carefully steadies the listener into a mode of measuring duration, a meditative self-awareness that deliver's Vanessa Amara's world. Always intricate, and effortlessly tender, Manos is an album as textural as it is melodic, and it is certainly the most exquisite suite of works to have been presented by Vanessa Amara thus far. Vanessa Amara is Birk Gjerlufsen Nielsen and Victor Kjellerup Juhl.