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There is a wall.
A wall that is now useless.
It simply sprouts like a mushroom in the open countryside: the decaying remains of an old water mill.
A wall of sun-drenched exposed bricks.
And there are two insects.
The first one—well-fed and lacking imagination—finds a home in the middle of one of the small terracotta rectangles, relaxes its antennas, and slowly bakes in the fire of the newly conquered stability.
The second one—thin, quivering, and with the legs of an adventurer—scrambles dartingly through the gaps and never lingers in any place; because it has no time to waste, because any fantasy involving resting in a terracotta rectangle mortifies its spirit before its flesh. Its choice is the threshold, the perpetual becoming, the possibility that never solidifies into realization.
Finally, there is the Illuha project, a Japanese-German combo that narrates the journey of that second insect: three long compositions that weave through the "Interstices" of an ambient at the edge of dronelike traditions and electroacoustic dissonances.
The first two-thirds of the album are a small miracle of balance where everything is a container and everything is content, everything leads and everything is led, everything is an interstice and nothing is a brick.
A kind of horizon line where sublunar breezes at the laptop elevate microsounds from the mystery of Mother Earth, where acoustic arpeggios worthy of the tribulations of a Machinefabriek high on heroin lend an earthly shade to the transcendence of subtle organ drones, where timid chords of a piano imbued with spleen obliquely scrutinize the silences of the unattainable Ideal, where even the Brechtian estrangement produced by a poem recited in Japanese doesn't completely steal the scene but merges with the pneumatic void of electronic calm.
A tingling yet delicate sound that delivers thrusts with the point of a foil and that—if it has as its noble father the organic search of a Robert Rich—finds its deepest elective affinity in "Faint," a masterpiece by Taylor Deupree pervaded by a use and abuse of field recording that almost entirely supplants the ripples of pure electronics.
The last third of the album—dominated by a synthetic heavenly vault—is perhaps the most démodé, but we must imagine that insect now having reached the top of the wall and simply considering which other paths to take, which other labyrinths to unlock, how much energy it has left in its legs, and what other sense to find in the journey of a whole life.
Desperately in limine and lost, once again, in another interstice: the one that separates transcendence from immanence.
The Illuha will try again the following year with "Akari" in which, despite the sumptuous production and some particularly apt piano caresses, very little remains of the magic of "Interstices" where the urgency of a story to be told constituted the focus of the album.
As if, ultimately, they chose a tile within which to encase themselves: pushed abstraction. An avant-garde all too often an end in itself which, taking to the extreme—when not being chewed over—the ideas of "Interstices" deconstructs every aspiration to life by vaporizing it into the ether.
As if by obsessively striving for the "new" they forgot that the accent, the gesture, the unexpected and vital mood is the consequence (and not the cause) of a genuine quest for the self and that, therefore, as Umberto Saba once definitively pointed out: "bisogna essere originali nostro malgrado".
One thing is certain: a life in the interstices is a hard life.
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