The music of Diatribes, a duo by the Geneva-based musicians D’incise and Cyril Bondi, induces hypnotic states. Lucia Udvardyova reflects about the inclusive communal effects of the duo’s radical sonic abstraction in their latest EP Sistere.

Lucid signifiers devoid of obvious meaning or reference to external circumstances point to a primordial and abstract sonic state where music floats in and out of consciousness over and over again. Layers of sound are intricately and gradually woven into a magic carpet that dissolves at the end and drops you back into the reality of the everyday. Aural cartographies and the mediation of recording processes in various spatiotemporal contexts (resonance, vibration, reverberation) are the main elements in Sistere, the latest release of Diatribes, a duo by the Geneva-based musicians D’incise and Cyril Bondi who run the renowned imprint & (meta) orchestra Insub.

Both pieces are more than twenty minutes long and are bona fide repetitive electroacoustic recordings that usher the listener into a hypnotic state of timelessness, an inclusive communal ritual, a Zen-like mantra, a wall of sound for perception projections. There’s an inherent subtlety and gentleness to the record, the music evolves over time horizontally and vertically, with added and deducted instrumental layers. Sistere is a very open record – it welcomes the active listener, without excluding the «passive», comfortably drowsy one.