Rose Hill Records proudly presents Limbo Channel, the new album from Basque-born experimentalist Nad Spiro. The enigmatic alias of Rosa Arruti, Nad Spiro has been an essential figure in Barcelona’s cutting-edge music scene for decades. The Limbo Channel is a haunting, liminal, late night album. A complete sound-world of cavernous spaces, textural drones, fractured guitars and mangled voices, all steeped in radio-art culture. Laden with static pulses and snippets of rhythms and electronics that surface before descending back into the murk, it’s both expansive and claustrophobic; a perfect distillation of the idiosyncratic sound Arruti has developed across her recent albums.
After performing at The Wire magazine’s 40th Anniversary event at The Rose Hill, Brighton, she was invited to be artist-in-residence at The Rose Hill Studios. For this she delved deep into her background in radical radio art and transmitted a daily nocturnal broadcast live on Slack City FM across Brighton and Manchester, whilst spending the days making new work in the studios. She invited a long list of collaborators and guest musicians including Mark Pilkington (Teleplasmiste), Lars Müller (Victor Sol, +N), Atsuko Kamura (Frank Chickens), MK Ibáñez (Dial), Adam Bushell (Tacit Ensemble) and Kassia Zermon (Bunty, Resonators) to get involved.
Diving into ideas of sonic channels, transmissions and of liminal night-time spaces, Nad Spiro wanted to establish a fluid creative exchange: herself becoming both the transmitter and receiver of sounds and signals (imaginary, pirate or alien!!), the symbolic antenna at the centre. Across a week of broadcasting and studio work this extended sonic voyage explored resonant connections, feedback
and transits as the Limbo Channel started to take form..!
The album opens with Malfi Freq - distant cavernous and glitchy drones into which beautiful vibraphone chords and phrases punctuate, like an fm radio dial suddenly passing over a radio station. Diodo continues in the murk, with Arruti’s vocals and synths cutting across the soundscapes, signals received from afar. Its not until Insectoid Saloon that beats emerge, compulsively pushing the music forward, and not until Solvent the final track that a hypnotic groove carries us away on the airwaves.
