A Platform (Martina Lussi Remix) by Opal Tapes

Emra Grid’s music is a difficult one to classify. Technically it’s adeptly crafted electro-acoustic composition and musique concrete, working extensions of the artists musical history working in sample driven hip-hop. Emotionally the music is bereft, without harbour. Neither positive or negative per se, here exists an emotional doldrums where major events pierce the continuum. Physically the music is enormously powerful, Emra Grid sculpts spaces out dense walls of frequency and coarse noise. Melody, when it does appear is often hung in an angel space, apparitions of the riff and never the riff itself.

Opal Tapes is very proud to release the fourth chapter of Emra Grid’s work, ‘A System A Platform A Voiid’ is a release charged with personal growth and loss and renewal, charting the relocation of oneself in a world unbalanced.

‘A System’ could be seen as “classic” Emra Grid, fluttering field recordings pressured up against peels of noise and dramatic low end swooping and looping the track together. Its melody; like a xerox of something ill-remembered. ‘A Platform’ is far more taught and poised. Taking a reading of Sylvia Plath’s ‘Tulips’ as its core it spins a helix of pulsing detritus around itself into an interlocking cage of sound. ‘A Voiid’ mimics a dubbed take on industrial adorned with all matter of hooting synth and locked door horrors. The A side and the final offering Emra Grid comes in the form of ‘(Epilogue) Wind to Safe Border’. A beautiful low-key hymnal of tremolating organs and shadow-like reverb.

Invited to remix tracks here are Pinkcourtesyphone aka Richard Chartier (LINE Records) who predilects to rework ‘A System’ in his ashen manner. Smearing the details of the original into blurred forms. Martina Lussi takes ‘A Platform’ into new zones with a skippy shuffling remix aimed head first at the pond life. Finally S S S S (Samuel Savenberg) dials up some fierce intensity in his take on ‘A Voiid’, a true climactic moment where the arpeggios eventually win out.

An inspiring listen in whole. Emra Grid continues to astound with each new release.