Marie Davidson & Invisible Church Whatever Makes You Feel Safe

Bologna’s Yerevan Tapes project vivid sci-fi sound designs from producer/signer Marie Davidson and sound designer Invisible Church, making up the duo’s first collaborative work, recorded during September 2016 - January 2017, and notably starring Theo Parrish playing cymbal on the 10 minute submission, Ten Years. Spawned from a meeting at RBMA’s Montreal ’16 festival, Whatever Makes You Feel Safe locates her signature vocals far removed from the structural synth-pop comforts of her roundly acclaimed debut side, Perte D’Identité, and the Adieux Au Dancefloor LP for Cititrax, and elusively diffused into chasmic frameworks of field recordings and depth charge percussion deployed by Invisible Church.In all three parts they feel out chasmic, void-like dimensions with a microscopic attention to textural and spatial qualities. Marie’s vocals signify a ghost in the machine presence on Collage, rendered as silvery streaks and cluster-formed cloud of ferric harmonics perfusing drizzly street or industrial scenes worthy of a Bladerunner scene. Never Release The Tension meanwhile isolates and focuses in on a blunted, atonal sort of post-industrial sound design recalling Mika Vainio in its brooding pressure, or even the elegiac glossolalia of Liz Fraser via Tropic of Cancer in its lamenting keen. \But the best is definitely saved for last with Ten Years, where speaker-drooping subs underline sheets of steely grey, phantasmic dissonance, punctuated by the patter and splash of Theo Parrish’s cymbal work, and possibly betraying a hint of influence from first nation musical traditions as much as kosmische or avant BM.