Lorenzo Senni - Persona EP

Pitchfork 75

For his first release on Warp, the Italian electronic producer Lorenzo Senni drew on impish visual artist Ed Atkins’ video piece “Ribbons.” If you haven’t had the fuddling pleasure of seeing Atkins’ videos in-person, they involve hyperreal digital animations—usually avatars of himself—as they stumble through video game-like realms, muttering pop songs in bedrooms, airports, pubs, clubs, and other surreal and mundane spaces. Atkins’ sodden protagonists may croon the likes of Elton John and Randy Newman, but his aesthetics match those of Senni. His tracks also revel and find depth in synthetic surfaces, make pop allusions, and simulate the maddening sensations that arise from the digital corporeality of our modern life.

Senni finds all the thematic material he needs in one of electronic music’s most maligned genres: trance. His early albums were forays into glitch and ambient, but with trance, Senni sought the ecstatic in isolating that music’s builds and breakdowns. He excludes the elements where most listeners would find pleasure centers of such music, in its bass and drums. Like Heatsick with his Casio and Aphex Twin’s own rabbit hole plunge with the Cheetah MS800, Senni maniacally deploys but one keyboard for all of his sounds, the Roland JP8000. As he told Fact last year, “if I had to approach trance music, I had to have that synthesizer.”

Persona is denser than Senni’s previous albums, as the JP8000 is now layered, each bit of space filled with more effects. The result is maximal. The delirious BPM and synth stabs that gush forth on “Win in the Flat World” are cheesy and over-caffeinated, initially bringing to mind the productions of Nozinja and even PC Music. But while the track keeps up its whiplash machinations, slowly little tears form in its synthetic fabric. A curlicue of electric sax appears, the dense chords dissolve, and a single key is left to fidget. “One Life, One Chance” is equally cartoonish, a festival’s-worth of fist-pumping anthems freeze-dried and then shoved into three-minute pop length. A smear of bright brass and color, EP standout “Rave Voyeur” is a dizzying carousel—which makes its fluttering breakdown and subsequent build-up, halfway through, all the more thrilling.

Trance may be what Senni references explicitly, but it’s when he lightens his tracks by just a few clicks that the underlying intent and intensity of Persona get teased to the surface. On a less-manic number like “Angel,” Senni wrings a sense of contemplation out of the fast arpeggios. Closer “Forever True” seemingly settles on a breakneck speed, but Senni slams on the brakes and the track turns spare, slow, and hushed. A catchy, if halting, melody emerges, and one can almost imagine a synthesized Atkins avatar awkwardly lurching to it.