Syntoma
Syntoma

Efficient Space: ...Bélver Yin's soul mining odysseys have been unjustly overlooked for three decades. An anomaly in the Spanish alt-pop scene, their forlorn instrumentals and ethereal romanticism would have struck a chord in the British league of Felt, The Chameleons, Cocteau Twins and Dif Juz, leaving their 1991 debut Luz Bel deserving of reappraisal.While coining their band name from a Jesús Ferrero novel and quoting Laozi philosophy on album sleeves, Bélver Yin create illuminating textures that unlock a wordless language of memory and adolescent emotion. Formed in Salamanca by self-taught musicians Pedro Ortega Sánchez and José María Martín, the guitar-bass duo spent two years crafting their divine interplay with interim drummers before submitting a demo to Noisex Music, their only attempt at label courting. The phone rang mere days later with owner and producer Bernar Marks (Dust Sessions) offering to cut an album and the band ventured to Valencia with cloud-touching optimism soon after.Championed by local press, the release fell short of expectation, fueling the mythology of a vanished band known only to the initiated. Varying lineups would, however, continue to work in the shadows under Pedro's direction, recording two spatially arranged follow-ups at their own pace in 1996 and 2005.A glorious debut that undeniably set a high watermark, Luz Bel is finally available again, faithfully remastered by Mikey Young and featuring bilingual liner notes from John Gómez, the authoritative ear behind Outro Tempo.

boomkat: ...As the artist acknowledges, “there’s a lot of serendipity involved in wrestling grooves out of these awkward machines”, and that’s where a lot of the chewy charm to ‘Pink Nothing’ stems from. Working with his re-imagined version of Daphne Oram’s uncompleted “Mini Oramics” machine - a slightly less unwieldy version of her drawing/light-to-sound interface for music making - which he finished in 2016, Tom harnesses its bleeps and whistles to palpitating bass drums owing to modern dance music, dreaming of what Daphne might have come up with if, as rumours imply, she really was at the first Shoom party.

tags: electronic, ambient, experimental, folk, japanese, thai, Japan