eMusic Review 0
Porcelain Raft's Mauro Remiddi is a nomad: Born in Rome, the guitar auteur relocated to London in 2009. This restlessness beats throughout his debut EP, Gone Blind. The title track is a snapshot of a shore, Rimiddi's vocals lapping against ebbing guitar before breaking into delayed and looped yelps; they're convincing enough to be mistaken for a gull's caw. But the tracks on Gone Blind don't just breeze by. Gone Blind shimmers with tambourine, bells and heavy reverb, and Remiddi, fully in control of his surroundings, captures the tension between the organic and the synthetic.
Remiddi's songs have a tightness, in their blend of disparate sources, that many of his bedroom-producer contemporaries fail to achieve. Using both live instrumentation and samples, Remiddi creates landscapes by blending sounds. It can be disorienting to navigate Remiddi's world, especially on the hazy standout "Talk to Me." Just beneath the pulsing bass drum, snarling guitar, and bruised effects, Remiddi mixes in industrial recordings that hiss and screech like expired brake pads. The seductive cut bobs like a skyline on the verge of collapse.
