Exit Blue Klein is the first release of a luminous collaboration between Agnese Menguzzato, Simone Antonioni and Soho Rezanejad. Recorded in 2023 between Berlin and EMS in Stockholm, the three musicians used a lean setup consisting of guitar, cello and vocals, and worked collaboratively on production to generate two resonant surfaces of sound and bare emotion.
It begins with “2Pablo”, opening with a picked guitar melody whose notes are pulled out into the most delicate ripple of reverb and delay. Piano chords step into the mix before Rezanejad’s vocals set the scene: “A celestial night.” The piano keys continue to skip alongside Rezanejad’s verse, and sunk in the mix we hear a whistling along to the guitar melody. At the song’s centrepoint, she sings, “The mirror may tarnish, covered with dust / a glimmer, we trust”, addressing the sky and its stars as a composite image of our earthly existence – as above, so below. The spirit of the composition is utter vulnerability, its simplicity shining because of the trio’s deft production of very few elements. It’s this nakedness that elicits tears from the copywriter, pretty much every single listen.
Rezanejad’s singing begins “Exit Blue Klein”, but rather than the closely-mic’d, overdubbed voice we hear on “2Pablo”, it is an exhalation washed with reverb. A granular synth-pad brings us into the track’s delicately structured fog: Menguzzato’s cello providing a warm, gnarled middle-ground, sometimes plucked into percussion and texture; Antonioni’s guitar accenting the song’s shifting planes of richly processed acoustic recording; and Rezanejad’s drawn out vowels contrasted with the vocalist speaking fragments of Farsi. Like Yves Klein’s ultramarine hue, the track envelopes us in the deepest of blue. At certain points, the electroacoustic cloud is punctured, as the cavernous reverb is cinched into dry recording, and the pivot back into dream is exhilarating. Spatially, the song is an unpredictable and dynamic joy to move through, a fogged but still very radiant reflection to the bare bones of “2Pablo”
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