Maná - Seven Steps Behind (2019)

After Daniele Mana's 2017’s debut EP for Hyperdub, ‘Creature’, which was a taut, evocative suite of beatless, almost neo-classical electronics, on this new album we find his music has caught an alien virus and started hallucinating.

‘Seven Steps Behind’ sounds like musical world building rather than straightforward song writing. Here the borders between reality and the weird have collapsed on each other, and with each listen through its zigzagging course, you’re rewarded by its strange twists and turns.

‘Seven Steps Behind’ is an electronic album that doesn’t always sound electronic; a great deal of the record has been created to sound like prepared pianos, harpsichords, cellos and flutes. At other times, sampled acoustic instruments and specially recorded sessions have been processed through software and careful editing. It’s this sophisticated layering of contrasting versions of the same sources that help give this record its uncanny balance. The album also plays with your sense of time in its mostly drum-free hall of mirrors, pulling from minimalism, chamber music, dark jazz, and synthesiser experiments.