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about this album
It has taken me entirely too long to get around to covering a Petrels album, but London composer/multimedia artist Oliver Barrett's third opus turned out to be an ideal place to start. Due to the complex and heavily processed nature of these pieces, the closest reference point is probably someone like Tim Hecker, yet Barrett's epic scope; talent for texture, dynamics, and melody; and passion for deep and unusual concepts place both Petrels and Mima in a category all their own. With both Talvihorros and Petrels on board, Denovali seems quite intent on becoming the go-to label for records with crazily ambitious concepts. Case in point: Mima is partially based upon an epic and obscure (in the US, anyway) science fiction poem by Swedish Nobel Laureate Harry Martinson. The poem in question, "Aniara," chronicles the existential struggles of colonists stranded on a spaceship that has been ejected from the solar system and has been described as "inexpressible, immeasurable sadness" that "transcends panic and terror and even despair leaves you in the quiet immensities, with the feeling that you have spent time, and have been permanently tinted, by and with an impersonal larger-than-God force." Woah. Consequently, Mima is the sort of album that I expected to describe with phrases like "unintentionally hilarious" and "egregiously misjudged" and–in lesser hands–I am sure it would have been all that and more. Or at least it would have just been oppressively bleak dark ambient. In
