The rising Warsaw label Glamour has a loose and humorous way of releasing music. Natalia Szczepańska and Julian Płoski, the label’s founders, have uttered quite a few superlative and tongue-in-cheek claims like to one made in relation to the upcoming album by Superalma Project. Always with a wink, Szczepańska and Płoski are taking pleasure seriously, rather than being serious for the sake of it (or for the sake of experimental music). This approach by the label will be highlighted in the upcoming issue of zweikommasieben in a portrait written by Kasia Jaroch.
Considering Glamour’s approach, Igor Almeida aka Superalma Project’s eight album The Endeavour To Understand feels almost too “serious” for the label. The Brazilian producer living in Portugal claims that “above all, [the album is] about [his] reality, not only as an immigrant in a foreign country but also as an artist who affirms his own creative freedom.” His goal of understanding and coping with reality resulted in thirteen tracks, a form of sound design without a single genre connotation. Over the course of the album, however, Almeida did not compose a sort of vast and hazy something through his free-form approach. Rather, he did put appealing melodies and recognizable sounds at the forefront of the short tracks.
Endeavour To Understand is a bittersweet something and it seems that Glamour, again, is about to release music that is primarily pleasurable, although the artist responsible for the music might have a more heavy-handed conceptual approach. But both approaches are legit and their combination makes the release stick out—at least it does in our opinion. And we are more than happy to premiere two tracks of this seriously pleasurable album: “Love Is A Many-Splintered Thing” and “The Dangerous Illusion Of Missile Defense”.
Superalma Project’s Endeavour To Understand is out via Glamour on November 26th and can be pre-ordered here.
