Cassette, Vinyl LP
Cucina Povera—the artistic alias of Finnish born, Glasgow-based musician Maria Rossi—is a phrase taken from the austere cooking methods of the peasants in southern Italian regions after World War II. While the culinary style was, at the time, an ingenious (and somewhat desperate) adaptation to the harsh economic conditions in Europe at the time, Rossi has taken it more as a philosophical inspiration. Her ethos is doing more with less, eschewing the use of the fancy equipment normally associated with experimental electronic music production and instead creating compositions out of simple elements: found sounds she records in her home, and on walks around the Scottish metropolis; minimalist synths, sparse percussion, and layered harmonies she creates with her own voice. The results are ethereal, meditative and, upon closer listens, slightly spiritual.
In that way, Hilja, Cucina Povera’s debut album, is a powerful study in limits. By using a deliberately restricted sonic palette, she directs the listener towards the beauty, the sadness, and the surprise that can be found in the most mundane details. The opener, “Demetra,” is built around two looped samples: one of Rossi hissing into a microphone and another of her harmonizing with herself. She shrouds these elements in reverb and complements them with a crescendo synth line that eventually fades into—like most of her compositions—silence. The follow-up track, “Kuparirumpu,” features a solo-choir with three distinct melodies that seem to expand and contract throughout the song, all of them in a tense competition with Rossi’s vocalizations. She follows this path—building around natural elements—throughout most of Hilja, using the spellbinding effects of chants and repetition to paint a picture of bucolic simplicity and strange, fraught beauty.
Throughout the album, Rossi takes advantage of the possibilities of darkness and the heavier aspects of minimal electronic music. “Avainsana” is a mind-bending trip, where she lures the listener in with a haunting, low-end synth line and a looped sample of what sounds like water leaking into a metal sink. Her voice then clears the way for a techno kick drum, which falls by the wayside just before the song ends. “Totean,” the album closer, is an outlier, resting primarily on low-frequency oscillators and ending with Rossi sporadically speaking. With Hilja, Rossi seems to want us to follow her into a game of possibilities, where even the smallest sounds can nourish the soul, if only we’d let them.
