illrecur – “Can’t Sleep” and “Struggle For Meaning”
illrecur has spent the last decade building an impressive resume of instrumental music releases, and if he continues at this pace, his catalog will soon rival, if it has not already surpassed the greatest of music composers, pushing him into the ranks of the true film score masters such as John Williams, Ennio Morricone, Max Steiner, and Jerry Goldsmith. Illrecur is not specifically a film music composer – as he moves through a variety of styles, including ambient, experimental and industrial – but his music on recent releases, including this one, which is entitled “Evolu”, has all the qualities you would associate with a top class movie score. In a catalog of 39 albums, this year alone he has already released 5 albums – “Mnemonics”, “Then were once than”, “Tautochrone”, “Upsodown” and “Evolu”.
The strength of illrecur’s compositions on this album, lies in his ability to tell a story, portraying intensity and emotion, like a plot element of its own. illrecur, which is the moniker used by Ohio based musician, Jeremy Allen Pursell, shows us just how well he understands this artistic mechanism.
He composes masterful movements that can capture whole scenes or highlight specific emotions present within your own mindset. He can build from atmospherics and very light keys to a full crescendo of horns and timpani, then drop decrescendos back to flowing strings before a sharp build and cut.
Another of the album’s strengths is its mix of orchestral and synthetic tones. At no point do the synthetic sounds feel separate or alienated from the orchestral ones. illrecur uses both orchestral and synthetic instrumentation to create brilliant tension and release emotions that wouldn’t have been captured adequately by either of those elements alone.
The tension of strings clashing with reeds or the unison of the percussive strikes, blasting horns, guitars and synth noises, showcases illrecur’s ability to draw the listener into a great audio spectrum which evolves into imaginary visual imagery.
If you only listen to only one instrumental album this year, “Evolu” is the one to hear. The great thing about illrecur’s composing is the way that he can embody all the emotive sounds and textures of the brass, strings and percussion, and bring them together to create a very haunting yet triumphed sound with differing timbres.
Listen his varying soundscapes on the blasting “Don’t Sleep”, then the ominous “Imposition”, as well as the excitable “Restruct Sequence”, to fully grasp how he uses the aforementioned instrumental elements.
In between he finds the time to move off in opposing tangents on the industrial powered push of “Powderburned” and the thunderous bone crushing “Synclastic”. He then slides into ambling experimentation on “Introflex”, before shifting into the piano pageant of “Eminent Threats”, which doesn’t disdain the use of dissonance to draw your attention.
Though illrecur is at his best, providing thrilling and pounding music that gets the heart racing and the emotions primed, he is also well versed in building dark, perplexing electronic soundscapes that simmer and ferment in the mind. Especially impressive in this disturbing musical idiom, are the tracks “Autre” and “Dorrente”.
In short, the album “Evolu” once again showcases illrecur at his best. Whether it’s brooding pianos, swashbuckling strings, snarling synths or pounding percussion, illrecur captures perfectly both the adrenaline-pumping intensity of such instrumentation as well as the natural timbres of their sounds. His music in many ways goes beyond just coloring the sound spectrum of his songs, but underscores the meanings contained within it.
