XIII hails modal electro-folk fantasias on a striking 2nd album – his debut for Dutch label Knekelhuis – akin to the mutated modes of Haunter head Heith’s PAN album, MOBBS’ redeyed downbeats, or CS + Kreme, Christos Chondropoulos and Jay Glass Dubs’ outernational explorations.
Since his first LP ‘No (The Relative effect of Explication)’ and early standouts on GoD label comps, Alessio Capovilla’s XIII has been sparing in his output, but more recently firmed his ideas on anachronistic fusions on an EP for C2C Festival in his native Turin, and now most definitively with the etheric prognostication of ‘Permanent Rain’. Ancient meets modern in eight songs suffused with mystic air in filigree meshes of acoustic and electronic sources, weaving captivating instrumental melodies across expansive backdrops embellished with vocals ranging from the purr of Sabina Kaufmann to Breadwoman’s spoken-in-tongues invocation on a closing cut redolent of This Mortal Coil.
Like some of the best, imaginative music coming from south Europe, by likes of Heith, Christos Chondropoulos, or Jay Glass Dubs, XIII’s music on ‘Permanent Rain’ is perhaps indicative of a need to neither dwell in the past or predict the future, but rather gauge a timeline perpendicular to predictable logic where the imagination can fill in the gaps. It’s a record that builds on the shoulders of new age ambient and neofolk expressions for the unknown age, vaulting heads between the Holy Mountain atmosphere of ‘Rientro In Alona’, to a sort of neofolk tarraxho in ‘Ladnaday’ and MOBBS-like club shadow music in ‘Hardtmuth’, and serpent-possessed South American hallucination ‘Black Tropica Data’, thru tot he dankest Shackleton-meets-CS + Kreme bass and drum pressure in ‘Where Are You Now’, with Breadwoman acting as ideal psychopomp between dimension on ‘Addendo Della Pietra’.