Oliver Arditi: It Is All An Illusion

From Oliver Arditi‘s review of It Is All An Illusion:

She just has some stuff she really wants to share, and her creative practice is driven by the important insight that the content should shape the form, and not vice versa. The measure of this music’s quality is its outstanding effectiveness as an act of communication; by conventional standards it sounds rhythmically tentative, melodically half-formed, its phrases more like conversation than the shapely rhetorical figures of mainstream songwriting. But sticking to the shapes and colours of established formula tends to restrict the meanings of the songs to those that formula was developed to convey, and although many composers have found ways to write around those tendencies, to great effect in many cases, It Is All An Illusion takes a more direct approach; Kloba confronts her meanings head on, and makes a music of her own experience, on her own terms.

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