By Mike Ferrer.
Raglani's use of analogue electronics is tied to traditional krautrock by a thread of dark romanticism extending, in Germany, back to the work of Caspar David Friedrich. Epic and tumultuous landscapes as images of psychic space; hazardous journeys through awesome and forbidding worlds; the hair-blown viewer looking down onto incredible canyons...The entire extended metaphor of Friedrich's work, linking the arc of a spiritual journey to the beautiful and tumultuous work of nature, is conserved in the work of the kosmische school. Raglani's relationship with the music of Schulze or Fricke is not 'retrospective,' but contemporary. The musical commonalities proceed from a shared commitment to the elaboration of exotic musical spaces, pursued chiefly through melody, adorned by figurative electronic flourishes and concrète motifs. What is missed in alot of drone and noise is the ability of the sound to paint a scene; too often, we're presented with a blandly ecstatic wash of lo-fi murk, more stoned than psychedelic. Raglani avoids these generic limitations by engaging more directly with the tradition to which his peers owe, arguably, the most considerable debt. What he deepens in that tradition is in the abstraction and development of themes--spreading out the narrative through textural variation, rather than driving ever forward through arpeggios and circular rhythms. This might give him more in common with Friedrich's Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog than with the cataclysm of his Sea of Ice; the voyage charted in Raglani's Of Sirens Born proceeds warily, but doesn't end in wreckage. If Raglani avoids the ascending freakouts of early kosmische music, however, it is because everyday life today is freaked out enough on its own. What is needed, rather, are sounds that can address our already-piqued uncertainty by involving it in a story it might recognize as its own. So there is little here, also, to tether Raglani to the generic vibrations of noise and drone, though he uses some of the machines that make them; instead of any massive simultaneous display, secrets are revealed gradually and cumulatively. Raglani's voice may sound familiar at first, and there is no doubting its context and sources, but the events described by his music trickle out in shapes, and at a pace, uniquely his. The scenes he composes, surreal but distinct, have all the luster of real paint.
