BLWBCK

Please Hold

The story of Please Hold, the debut album from Pragher, begins with an old telephone containing forgotten and low-fidelity recordings. This substrate, enriched over the months with ether-laden drones and samples from his grandmother's vinyl collection, metamorphoses anarchically. The result is an interplay of ambient textures populated by fields recordings that seem as distant as they whisper in our ears, where memories vanish just as we thought we'd grasped them... as if anaesthetized... or under the influence of a strong opiate. A savant digest of snapshots from different eras on which the Milan-based musician skilfully lays his synthesizers, laden with pulsations and melodies, freeing us from this emotional quicksand : It's Nice To See You In Good Spirits, with its sequence chasing away the mist, before joining bagpipes in an anachronistic dance; the eletronic loop of Sleeping With The Angels Now wedged between a nursing home TV spitting out a program from another time and the reassuring sound of rain on the window; or the urban down-beat of Gustav ... It's this ambivalence of feelings and this interplay of temporalities that give "Please Hold" its particular charm. Intriguing like the superb painting by Agnese Guido used on the cover, navigating constantly between dreams, amnesia, memories and déjà-vu ... A duality even reflected with the choice of a production with a delicate attention to detail, to celebrate the rough edges of our inescapable obsolescence. Dangerously addictive