Bruno Pronsato, Roméo Poirier, Memotone - Toinen Kaupunki (Sahko)

The Slow Music Movement
Jun 5
2 min read

*** This blog post first appeared in TSMM's June 3rd Newsletter, where you can get all the tips (and more) first ***

The cover art for Bruno Pronsato, Roméo Poirier and Memotone's, Toinen Kaupunki EP on Sahko Recordings. The image is abstract black and white artwork with geometric shapes, scribbles in corners, and layered textures. High contrast and minimalist design.

Helsinki’s Sahko Recordings deserve a long service achievement award for outsider electronica over the decades and you have to admire their continued vision in getting these three boundary nudging artists to align.

Bruno Pronsato started life as a rock drummer before heading into electronic realms to produce lush, leftfield techno and minimal house; more recently dabbling in less club focussed genre cross-pollination. Oddly enough Roméo Poirier also started life as a percussionist before taking the electronic route to creative fulfilment by exploring lower lit, partly submerged electroacoustic realms that defy easy description but which have a unifying warmth. Finally Memotone is a self-taught multi-instrumentalist and producer that roves about minimal, ambient, improvisatory and contemporary classical realms with a fondness for listenable waywardness. They’re quite the trio

Roméo Poirier - Bruno Pronsato - Memotone's shadow and hand.

Poirier gets the ball rolling with a recently extended version of “Thalassocratie”, a track from his excellent 2020 album Hotel Nota. Retaining the liquid percussion and late night ambience he goes to work on the already effected trumpet, dialling down its abstract nature even further by stretching it close to breaking point and teasing the listener with an extra two minutes of mind expanding ambient jazz not jazz not anything really.

Pronsato also takes an opening track from a past album and extends it by an extra eight minutes no less; extending the hip hop beats, spoken words, modular tones and cinematic noir atmospherics, eventually taking the track into more expansive percussive and psychoactive territory. It’s a hypnotic gem that really sucks you in and leaves you blinking in the cold light of reality once it stops.

Not to be outdone, Memotone steps up the plate with the jazziest not jazz cut on the LP, his horn preferring a gentle swirl as it rides what sounds like a campfire recording which gradually morphs into rhythmic electronica, the horn teasing more familiar forms as the track intensifies.

This EP is a trip, great work by everyone involved.