Triac: Days
LINE

On the back cover of Triac's Days, the electronic music trio thanks Richard Chartier, LINE's curator and showrunner, Italian artist Marco Marzouli, and acclaimed music producer William Basinski, but of the three it's the latter with whom, musically speaking, Days has most in common. That being said, the album's material could also be mistaken for a Celer or Stephan Mathieu production, especially when the album features glassy drones and tremulous wisps of processed sound shimmering like light reflections and hanging suspendedly in mid-air.

Formed in 2011, Triac blends the talents and musical contributions of Marco Seracini (piano, synthesizer), Augusto Tatone (electric bass), and one-time TU M' member Rossano Polidoro, who's credited with laptop on the recording and leads the group project. Recorded in 2014 and fifty-one minutes in length, Days' seven tracks are sequentially titled—“Day One,” “Day Two,” etc.—to imply that each piece was created in a single day. The keyboards and bass sounds rarely if ever appear in unaltered form; instead, they assume a blurry character, presumably the result of Polidoro's laptop treatments. The tracks vary in duration, with the shortest four minutes (“Day Seven”) and the longest twelve (“Day Three”). While that long setting is also arguably the recording's standout for how it so subtly and artfully sequences its fragile elements into an alternately murmuring and whistling whole, “Day Five,” impresses too in the way a faint residue of melancholy seems to rise off of its softly shimmering surfaces. In such cases, the similarities between Triac's peaceful meditations and Celer's cloud-like formations are hard to miss.

Days whispers at a near-subliminal level that likens it to ambient music in the textbook wallpaper-like sense; still, while there is a sense in which its material recedes into the background, there's enough development and dynamic range within a given track to hold one's attention and keep one engaged. There's a strong degree of uniformity to the album, yet at the same time each of the seven settings presents a slightly different prismatic portrait of the trio's music.

December 2015