Mordecoli - Château Mordécoly

Debut album from a UK/Italian duo whose previous two tapes had been floating around in our peripherals for a short while but to which we'd not given our full attention until now. All signs point to a grave error on our part. Chateau Mordecoly (this pair seem to be smart with the nomenclature) is said to be the result of "a red wine induced residency at London's Cafe Oto", which might have some running for the hills but is certainly a lot more than i've achieved whilst drinking between those four walls. So what was actually induced? There's some lovely interplay between the real and, for want of a better term, artificial, Ecka Mordecai's cello, harp and occasional vocal intersecting with Valerio Tricoli's tape manipulations, the result a kind of uncanny haunted drone caught between worlds. Sort of like being drunk on red wine, i suppose, a sense of altered or refracted state, like the stream is jarring and a touch out of sync, a ghost in the machine. That Mordecai's cello has an especially gothic quality - a looming spire of a sound - only adds to the eerie melodrama. And when the closing track dissolves into a final three minutes of just harp and harmonising vocal, like a particularly unadorned and rapturous Josephine Foster, notions of the real and the artificial are moot: this is the divine.