ALBUM: Fiona Soe Paing – ‘Alien Lullabies’

Appearing to be a master of manipulation, you first hear Fiona Soe Paing‘s talents for vocal distortion on track two of her new album Alien Lullabies, ‘Tamin Sah Pade’. Paing makes the three minutes so haunting and eerie that it’s easy to forget your surroundings and seep into a much darker plain.

This same feeling can be applied to the proceeding cut, ‘Tah Stin Koh Mpor’. Again, weaving a chilling underbelly with some distant dial tones and lethargic intrusions of battered worn synth, Paing has a knack for creating sinister soundscapes.

The majority of tracks on Alien Lullabies remind me of artists like Tool in the way that the vocals and dark production come together to create a shadowy monolith of negative energy. Track four in particular -‘Swamp Blues’ – is linear in composition yet vast in its various different tones. Peter Gabriel is another artist who springs to mind at times during the record, specifically his Up era; potentially acting as an influence to Paing.

A few tracks like ‘Winter’s Day’ and ‘Heartbeat’ aren’t as grand. However, my favourite cuts, including the glitchy and layered ‘Tower Of Babel’, do tap hard on a primal instinct inside and the vocals come across like an isolated tribe’s chants but in a digital landscape. This juxtaposition of sound to techniques is something I really dig and if you’re into electronic music which is experimental, fragmented and at times nightmarish then you’ll definitely find some interesting things here.

This record would be the perfect soundtrack for a neo-noir science fiction film about something insidious yet glorious in conclusion. Alien Lullabies is a solid piece of electronica and I could certainly see some great remixes coming in the future.

Alien Lullabies is out now via Colliderscope.

Connor Ryan