Alessandro Coronas is a music conservatory dropout from Cagliari, Italy who has turned his musical interests to producing delicate electronica chamber pieces.
The result is a quirky, but enjoyable, album that will make you think of the slower works of Kieren Hebden (Four Tet) or Fridge and may tempt you into tagging Ballpen as Folktronica (a musical genre widely used by critics yet universally loathed by musicians).
This album might easily have been titled 'songs for sleepy heads' since, as Coronas explains, "the way the songs are composed are similar to what I've experienced in my dreams so far".
The vocal parts (Coronas himself plus unnamed female singers) are yawned/drawled as if by someone who is not fully awake or else contain the type of odd lyrical combinations born of post-dream-state transcriptions.
In Dream Episodes, you can ponder surreal lines like: "lifting - rock drills / a dog might have said so / columns and foreheads / billions of handshakes".
On The Bus Stop Dream, you can scratch your head over the following scenario: "your ticket is valid for the next 30 years/ go and check some bus stations /you might find /a dog with your necklace".
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All this leads you to suspect that the artist's nightcap may be laced with potent hallucinogenic substances.
Alternatively, Freudian analysts would have a field day trying to unpick the Dadaist word association of The Magazine Dream : " a glass - a hotel - a man - a woman -a fork - a window - a princess - a mushroom.......etc".
The instrumentation is as meandering as the lyrics but it is never wayward. And be assured that even a track called Serene Nightmare will not cause sleepless nights. It has a gentle, lethargic tempo, a little like a slowed down musical box.
In short, this is a charming and soothing album that would make an ideal soundtrack to an afternoon snooze or Sunday morning lie-in.
Ballpen on La Bel Netlabel
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