BELGRADO – El Encuentro

“At long last a chance to wander behind the sky. In the chaos of the momentary and the infinity of the image, the room hums among the countless reverberations of voice and body in which, for the most part, we remain unseen. BELGRADO, a ring of keys chiming through an empty prison hallway liberating every iron door as it approaches in countless careful celebrations of its passage. El Encuentro, meaning “The Meeting” or “The Encounter” pulses in cool kindness and high energy reverie, probing the same moment from a thousand angles as if Alain Resnais photographed their own private hallucinations and burnt them into song. That moment, THE moment is so elegantly woven into lyrical silk on “El Encuentro” as an exploration of dreams and reality, deep personal reflection, and acceptance of the end. It is the search, and the crossroads of the ethereal science of the imaginary. It sounds like being led into the back room of a tiny club in an imaginary city lost in time – intimidating whirring machinery drawing you in as if to lure you into wrecking on the rocks in a spume of Last Year at Hacienda-bad, dizzy on Righeira punch, and burnt by the Balearic sun. 15 years after their debut, Belgrado continue their journey of musical development from the immediacy and directness of their guitar driven post punk sounds all those years ago into an ever evolving musical project which has spanned four LPs ranging from minimal wave and dub influences all the way to this effort which is so heavily influenced by early dance music, and prime beachfront bacchanal. It is as much the cold sounds of SIEKIERA as it is CABARET VOLTAIRE bleeding into NEW ORDER. Packaged beautifully, hand crafted in an early modernist and constructivist style of artwork depicting the band in workers garb hinting at both the labour and ongoing service of the artist to the audience. This is a relationship they explore, in which the band declares a “celebration of the phenomenon of music as a meeting between people, both in the moment of its creation and in the energy of a live performance.” (Jonah Falco)