Sanso-Xtro
Sentimentalist

Melissa Agate, an Australian girl with a past as an avant drummer, crafted 11 good songs in 2005 and pulled out of the hat a difficult but interesting album.

I don't want to get lost or waste your time reading this review, so it's worth immediately framing the product in question: about thirty minutes of loops, electroacoustic noises, sounds destroyed and reconstructed with some missing pieces, and annoying ambient inserts with digital pearls.
If you find it appropriate to venture your ears into this world, you will not be disappointed. Certainly, this is not just any album, to be used as background music for our walk or to listen to in the car's CD player; it's an album you need to be willing to and mentally prepared to listen to.
"The Last Leaf" represents the paradigm of the album; if you want to listen and base your judgment on these four minutes, you can immediately understand if the rest might be for you. I believe this beginning has interesting solutions, small acoustic frescoes in a sequence of added and removed sounds, sounds taken from the world of electronics and beyond that juxtapose without construction (or perhaps they do?)... Type records carries these notes on their shoulders and decides to release them in 2005. Courage but also foresight, attention to talent, but also a gamble.

When I listen to this CD, I stop to reflect on the creation of music in its being. Often I wonder what drives the artist in these sound cascades to put a period? I have many experimental records in my collection, each the same or different and with different cues, but the question I ask myself is precisely about creation as such... I picture Melissa Agate sitting behind a series of wires, keyboards, bizarre instruments, searching for inspiration, with the hunger to assemble, with her mind not on the audience but on herself.
Sometimes I believe that some tracks are too much of a personal compositional outburst, too hermetic and disturbing to appreciate them as music per se, yet fascinating in the research and because, with this girl, light-years away from my home, I found an identification with my grumpy moments.
In summary: perhaps Melissa Agate gets pissed off like I do?
She doesn't scream or punch anyone, but tries to vent with entirely personal expressions. I also don't get furious or curse the sky, but I invade myself with a certain grumpy, sharp soul that I find in these notes, take "Spark" or "Minus Ecki," for example.

"And Then Return To Zero" represents one of my favorite moments, where xylophones, loops, and instruments of all kinds stumble in a chaotic and seemingly constructless kaleidoscope, yet fascinating. "Like White Fire" closes the album in a rather surprising way, with a melodic light, a faint hope of inner and artistic serenity.
Before this last track, one could breathe a slight esoteric jazz breeze, an atypical mix that leaves room for a dichotomy in the definition, "ambient noise"... I know, perhaps I'm confusing you, maybe it doesn't even make sense to try to define these sounds, but with a calm spirit, not having to at all costs fish for a masterpiece for your collection, keep this album as the card to pull out at the right moment for yourself and your disturbed moments.

A light headache begins to throb on my forehead, but I'm not worried; it means this album has achieved its purpose, maybe I'll listen to it again in a few months or years, when my nervousness channeled into noises will melt again like snow in the sun...