Atki2 - Requiem (The state51 Conspiracy)

Mourning is disrupted throughout Atki2’s Requiem, where ambient piano pieces are transformed by electronic interference and worn crackle

Requiem is a means for Atki2 to remember his mother and also examine his grief. The Bristol artist has produced an emotive piece of work that is as unquiet as it is elegiac. Gentle piano is disrupted by electronics, creating an unsteady sonic landscape that recalls the supernatural disruptions of mourning throughout Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now.

“Morning Alarms (Introït et Kyrie)” descends upon the listener with spare piano, circling around a forgotten dream of days past. The air is removed and electronic washes inhabit the void. Reality-shaking stabs of interference crackle like a thousand voices yanked out of virtual afterlife. An uneasy haunting where the ghosts have hijacked flesh and blood reality. It’s Burial channelling his inner Aphex Twin during spiritual crisis. The backdrop changes with “Longest Day (Offertoire)” to the inside of a vast cathedral where the angles are all wrong, the geometry impossible. There are two universes inside, rubbing against one another. Painful static bursts bite into the ambient waves, breaking down the architecture of the dream.

Inception is paused on “Six Million Ways to Die and I Wouldn’t Choose Yours (Sanctus)”. The piano gets enough space to float up and out of the room, into the sky. It is held there for a time, wrapped in choral voices, tethered to the earth by droned strings. “Hertford Hasn’t Changed (Agnus Dei)” is akin to the Kronos Quartet’s work on Heat and is worthy of those luminous Michael Mann cityscapes. Atki2 gains some distance here, looking over the interior rather than being cocooned inside of it. He does introduce a worn crackle however, making the piece sound like it has been retrieved in the far future; a glimpse back at a sepia past. Think Replicants studying photographs of childhoods they never had.

“Even the Ghosts Must Go (Libera Me)” has been beamed in using broken-down advanced technology. Jaunty synth lines squelch and bleep; Squarepusher in slow time. Each staccato pulse, every electro-viral deconstruction has purpose. Atki2’s way with sound is not chaotic, yet he does introduce agents of change, abrasive interruptions that are as much a dialogue with himself as with the music. He disrupts his own memories, folding anarchic elements into the narcotic of grief, refusing to let it numb him. Having taken a sonic scalpel to his own psychopathology, Atki2 gives up the ghosts on “To the Fair Lady with the Fair Hair (In Paridisum)”. They can gently go.