Levelling follows the haptic and mental journeys in a process of exploring and experimenting with a new instrument. The trajectory unravels as the sound is sculpted in real-time, balancing between intuitive and attentive creative tendencies, floating across measurements of different conceptual/perceptual elevations and coincidental discoveries.

Notes:
Improvisations recorded in London, UK during November 2014
Mastered by Maria Papadomanolaki & Paul Keeley

Review:
“Dalot is one of the many expressions of sound for Maria Papadomanolaki. She has a comprehensive list of recording work whether as Dalot or as part of Kasetina or squetti. But Papadomanolaki is not limited only to recordings, she’s done work in radio, text, sound installations, etc. She’s recently released an episode on Radius. Dalot’s Levelling on the netlabel Panospria is her first foray into the Creative Commons netlabel scene. (Point of order: she has a track on one of the Sequence compilations.) Levelling is an artistic exploration of a new instrument and is broken up into four improvised tracks, each having a different texture than the others. The first track opens with deep bass tones which slowly greet other accents. The liner notes say that the album is a “balancing between intuitive and attentive creative tendencies” and in the first track, even though there is a nomadic feel , the different sounds are supportive of each other. The second track is the longest of all at 13:30. Though improvised drone recordings can sometimes be very difficult as musicians have a tendency to drag them out for much longer than they should, Dalot skillfully doesn’t fall into this trap. Each musical interlude of this extended track concisely delves into the electronic voices that Dalot is exploring. Given the breadth of “Level 2″, it should come as no surprise that that this track travels more thoroughly through the electronic musical spectrum, each phase though divergent are quite reciprocal working off of each other. It is important to note that Levelling is much more than a drone album, especially if one only thinks of drone music as sustained or drawn out note clusters. That said, the third track is the most dronish of all. Instead of building up a wall of sound, “Level 3″ takes on a more minimalistic and more successful approach to exploring drones. The fourth and final track opens in the most electronica fashion. There has been glimpses of this musical genre throughout, yet “Level 4″ is the most unapologetic of all the tracks in grasping it and extracting all the fades and reverb to a searing conclusion. As I mentioned earlier, Levelling is Papadomanolaki’s first release in the Creative Commons music scene. Hopefully, this won’t be the last we see of Dalot’s music here.”
—Acts of Silence

• Date available:
  2015-02-17