Logs, Leaves, An Aquarium
Two gorgeous post-ambient records from Perila and Ulla
“My own intrinsic rhythm – the one which centers and grounds me – is slow, way slower than life today wants us to be”, says Perila. “When you slow down, you can notice all the mesmerizing beauty and capture the sound world differently.”
Perila is a Berlin-based artist that builds introspective worlds from soft-spoken vocals, field recordings, electronics and splashes of analogue instruments – headphone soundscapes designed to get lost inside.
Her music conveys a feeling of proximity – her voice cooing, humming and whispering wordless poetry over shimmering sculptures of textures and ambience, tones and chimes.
Perila’s 2021 breakout album How much time it is between you and me? came into being during a retreat into the wild French mountains.
Staying at a rural cabin all by herself, without internet access or phone reception, she didn’t communicate with other humans during those days. She went on long hikes, prepared simple meals and wrote music about observing nature and witnessing the passage of time.
Born Alexandra Zakharenko in St. Petersburg, Perila grew up on a diet of Radiohead and Ryuichi Sakamoto – thanks to her father, a serious music fan and devoted Buddhist.
She moved to Moscow for university and started to play music in a local synth-pop outfit, but by the mid-2010s, she moved again – this time to Berlin. Here she found an underground DIY network of like-minded artists and DJs pushing the envelope of ambient and electronic music.
Since then, Perila has been releasing records and tapes through a dizzying array of indie imprints – among them Motion Ward, Experiences Ltd./3XL, Shelter Press, Longform Editions, Paralaxe Editions and Lillerne Tapes. She has also been self-releasing a steady stream of music through her Bandcamp page, which she treats like an aural diary.
Her newest full-length, Intrinsic Rhythm, is a 64-minute collection of 21 tracks, released on double vinyl by Norwegian indie Smalltown Supersound.
A personal note from the label’s founder Joakim Haugland likens the record to “an imaginary soundtrack to Tarkovsky’s The Mirror” and calls it “the definitive Perila release”.
In fact, it does seem like a refined, conceptual statement and more of an actual follow-up to How much time it is… than many of her Bandcamp projects, which often resemble raw emotional snapshots.
Intrinsic Rhythm’s beatless vignettes feel refreshingly “uncomposed” – you will literally hear a voicenote of the artist singing during a hiking trip, complete with footsteps in the background – but viewed in its entirety, this mosaic of sketches forms a coherent body of work, the mood and energy shifting slightly on each of the four vinyl sides.
Prolific as she is, Perila released even another new project in 2024, a full-length collaboration with the enigmatic Ulla Straus, a like-minded spirit from the post-ambient scene.
I saw both artists live one year ago, in January 2024, when they performed on the same night at Roter Salon, a club within Berlin’s Volksbühne theater.
That night, Ulla – who just goes by her first name these days – played an electronic set loosely based on her brilliant Foam album (2022). Her glitchy clicks and cuts recall heady German electronic musicians of the 1990s, such as Oval or Pole, or even Nuno Canavarro’s Plux Quba.
In the dimly lit room, the producer – who has lived in Kansas, California and Philadelphia, but now resides in Berlin as well – remained an elusive figure, similar to her appearance in the grainy, hazy images that accompany most of her releases.
I first noticed Ulla in the late 2010s as part of the West Mineral Ltd. collective around outsider house and ambient music innovator Huerco S.; she also released on labels like Quiet Time, Experiences Ltd. and Motion Ward. Her masterpiece Foam came out on the Berlin-based 3XL.
Already orbiting the same galaxy, Ulla and Perila got introduced to each other during the early COVID days. Separated by the Atlantic ocean, they started remotely working on collaborative projects.
Throughout the pandemic years of 2020/21, they released some of the resulting tracks in various formats, including a duo album as LOG.
They’d never actually worked together in the same room until they recorded 2024’s Jazz Plates in Perila’s Berlin bedroom.
The title of that record is slightly misleading. According to the press blurb, the music was inspired by their shared love for the 1970s spiritual jazz of Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders, but to be honest, I don’t hear those references in the music.
Released on Barcelona’s Paralaxe Editions, Jazz Plates rather operates somewhere between their usual experimental ambient and free improvised music.
In stark contrast to their earlier work, it’s a largely acoustic endeavour though, performed on instruments like clarinet, guitar, piano, voice and “various non-musical objets - logs, leaves, an aquarium”.
What the press blurb calls “ghostly half-songs” are in fact little more than loopy song fragments, seemingly without much structure to them. But finally improvising together in real time, in the same room, set free an emotional sensuality that was only hinted at in previous collaborations.
Electronic music connoisseur
aptly wrote that these little sound sculptures have “no goal other than to exist in this other world for a little while longer”.I agree that Jazz Plates’ strong appeal lies exactly in that unpretentious, aimless drift.
This music doesn’t ask anything from you. It doesn’t even try to be beautiful.
It simply exists in its very own space. You’re free to enter and leave; the music doesn’t care.
At the center of this music lies the notion of purposefully slowing down, ignoring the frantic tempo and constant demands of modern life to listen deeper, not just into yourself, but also to nature and your surroundings.
Call it mindfulness, call it resonance, call it whatever you want.
This is how I want to start the new year.
Perfect piece to start the year! Thanks, Stephan.
Excellent piece, these two continue to be shining lights in a dim world. I’d also highly recommend perila’s collaborative album PMXPER (with Pavel Milyakov) also on Smalltown Supersound - utterly beguiling to say the least.