Temporary

Aimée Portioli is on record for stating that peace resides in perpetual change, a sentiment that sits rather less comfortably on an album titled Temporary, whose second track, with canny irony, is called "Come to Stay". And stay it does. The synth melody leading the song lingers in the head like a catchy cutting-room-floor film score, which is rather good going for a composer who once told me she never sees images when she writes. The question, then, is whether she still believes it. Tuning the Wind was a philosophy of motion, all air going where it pleased and its maker a dedicated pan-European wanderer who declined to be fixed in an image of rooted identity, whereas this record, made in the wake of grief, is what happens when the wind stops and something has to be sat with. It would be easy to reach for the vocabulary of tears and despondency, but the record is much too composed for that kind of patter. Its sonic statement is immediately tense, earnest and pensive to the core, the sound of a mind turning a loss over in the dark without once raising its voice. The penultimate "Maybe I am Dead and This Is Paradise" finds that composure giving way to a fuzz-laden guitar crescendo that drives the song towards a mounting sense of post-rock finality, while the harping keys intensify with the Sisyphean momentum of a dawning realisation. It's something felt before it can quite be understood or reconciled. By the aptly scenic closer, "Work of Ending", the acoustic strings interweave with the warm, looping tremolo synth, beneath which sporadic keys emerge, before the piece settles into a tentative resolution that stops short of closure. Peace is still on offer, though it arrives the way it does in life, which is to say late and at a cost. Only five hundred copies will exist on vinyl, a hundred of them clear, which in an economy of infinite streaming (yes, that old chestnut) feels like the right sort of stubbornness – a record about endings pressed in an edition that will indeed have one. Ambient music this patient is rarely this unsettling, and rarer still this well-crafted. But we can dispense with the superlatives, however sincerely intended, and simply say that it's a fine production of music. It's one to have looping in your buds on a frost-bitten motorway in Munich while you’re confronting that all-too-human burden of amor fati. It may be “Temporary”, but it's still doing the rounds on my playlist, and will very likely keep doing so.