March 26, 2021 - Hands In The Dark
Following the death of Tom Relleen, TOMAGA’s other half Valentina Magaletti has released their final album, Intimate Immensity. Morbidly relaxing, the project offers great diversity in approach, despite its high school honors poetry title. Concerns of another steel drum trance album quickly slithered away, replaced by subtle melody, surreptitious rhythmic acuities, and daring prog rock carved with roads of electronica.
Only after spending some time with the album did it come to my attention that the impending death of Relleen motorized the mastering process and release. This imbued Intimate Immensity with heightened ceremony and another crosswind, cracking open my callowness with transformation on each subsequent listen.
The project possesses great urgency, from start to finish. ‘Idioma’ sets the tone with estuarial polyrhythms conveying imminence, teasing towards a melodic source. Something in the drone of percussion suggests a watershed, a wellspring, a depth, a height; who cares which direction it goes.
The second track confirms suspicions. The long-awaited texture arrives, a romantic synth blossoms, the percussion is clear and articulate. I began to pick up whatever it was that Relleen and Magaletti were putting down. It was thirst-quenching. ‘The Snake’ allures with barren rhythms of a desert bearing an oasis at its heart, lusciousness just within the outskirts of survival. An old adage retold.
Then out of nowhere, there’s Cathy Lucas, just chanting in the middle of ‘Very Never (My Mind Extends).’ This is the first surefire sign that we’re dealing with multi-instrumentalists who’ve cut their chops in a broad range of projects (The Oscillations, Vanishing Twin, UUUU, etc.). Tinny drums, ostensibly abnormally played gongs, wind instruments that might be child toys, a chime or maybe a rusty wheel-drum from a 1996 Toyota Tercel make their way into the album, reaching an especially fevered pitch in ‘Non Sia Mai.’
‘Reverie for Fragile Houseplants,’ cleanses the palate with arpeggiated synths, gently downclimbing from the raucous and bloated beating in ‘British Wildlife.’ But even this lullaby-ish twinkler becomes fraught with a chaotic patter, insinuating a rupture just beneath. The plucky fright, which may be what the romantics referred to as the sublime, carries into the final track, ‘Intimate Immensity.’ The last tango is a harmony of slowly realized chords and an unyielding percussion section that seems to complete the equation of entropy as it’s popularly understood: that chaos tends towards life and order. ⛰️