Review: SRFélix - S/T

Opening track “We Walk Until The End” is a grand underwater corridor into which the listener is swept – watery collations of violin and flute ripple on either side, with the shimmering lights of feedback and e-bow drones announcing themselves through steady, tidal surges. It’s a warmth that floods inwards, gently guiding the listener through the blurs of colour and sound, alleviating gravity to leave one weightless and strangely afloat.

The listener is hereon carried between the EP’s six pieces with the force of a mild river current – offloaded gently inside a piano for “The Wind Dies”, in which muffled hammer strikes and intermittent pedal creaks sing a lonely ballad into empty space, before being charmed into the company of the solemn guitar fingerplucks of “Leaving Home”. There’s a certain shyness to SRFélix’s work; he hides within softened tones and reverb masses, avoiding brash or forceful gestures to instead communicate via implication and moderate melancholy. And as the dimming drones of closer “Until The End” fade to nothing, SRFélix still feel like something of an unknown, yet there’s undoubtedly an allure to the EP’s mystique and quiet handling of the unsaid.