Nick Bollinger considers the meeting of electronica, classical orchestration and personal mythology in the debut of Christchurch artist Indi.
Indi Photo: supplied
There was a time when the worlds of electronic music and classical orchestration seemed unbridgeable. The languages were too different, tonal palettes too hard to blend. But over the years more and more musicians have had the courage to try, or just refused to see the boundaries. Amongst this group is Indira Force.
Until a year or so ago the Christchurch-based musician was a member of Doprah, whose dreamy electronic pop had people predicting big things. But the band dissolved before those things had a chance to happen, and Force went back to working on her own.
Now recording simply as Indi, she’s released her first solo album. It’s boundary-breaking and beautiful.
Precipice Photo: Seraphine Pick
You can hear the full sweep of Indi’s music in the title track, with busy glitchy percussion, synths, strings and horns and Indi’s multiple voices layered over the top. The effect is like flying over a canyon.
But the album also has a narrative thread, which starts in the song she names after the Greek fertility goddess, ‘Demeter’ and finds its most direct expression in the song simply called ‘Woman’. In this epic track she uses horns against a bed of fizzing electronics as she weaves her own mythological tale.
The mother of this kind of music is obviously Bjork, and there are places where the Icelandic artist's influence on Indi is evident. Listen to her vocal on the verses of ‘Cannibal’. Yet by the time we get to the chorus, Indi has already taken off on a tangent of her own and the song takes a journey as exciting, dramatic, unpredictable as that of this album as a whole.
Precipce is available on Bandcamp
