PYUR is the moniker of Sophie Schnell, a Berlin-based synaesthesiac whose debut album, Epoch Sinus, is a sonic exploration of fantasia. She sought to make her vision accessible, despite being spellbound by the boundless manipulative capacity of electronic music, and accompanied the album by a video piece for each track to give visual insight into her process of creating it.
Teeming with the aural artefacts of earthly life, Epoch Sinus is a poised collage of found sounds whose timbres move between moments of cacophonous brutality and introspective softness. The album opens coyly with "Epoch Sinus I," whose overture is a gentle whirring that playfully dances around an arpeggiated marimba before languorously inviting the rest of the album's clamour to the stage.
Textural and symphonic, Epoch Sinus is a genuinely thoughtful record whose raucous tonality violently swells, only to unravel suddenly and recede to the brooding fragility that underscores much of the album's coarseness. PYUR's aesthetic stylistically aligns her with contemporaries such as Ben Frost and Nicolas Jaar, made clear by the emotive pauses and cinematic stretches of abrasion throughout Epoch Sinus, though it's hardly derivative.
Schnell has said that "the music was making [her], not the other way round," on this record, a fact that feels apparent in the frank nature of the instrumentation throughout the album.
(Hotflush)Teeming with the aural artefacts of earthly life, Epoch Sinus is a poised collage of found sounds whose timbres move between moments of cacophonous brutality and introspective softness. The album opens coyly with "Epoch Sinus I," whose overture is a gentle whirring that playfully dances around an arpeggiated marimba before languorously inviting the rest of the album's clamour to the stage.
Textural and symphonic, Epoch Sinus is a genuinely thoughtful record whose raucous tonality violently swells, only to unravel suddenly and recede to the brooding fragility that underscores much of the album's coarseness. PYUR's aesthetic stylistically aligns her with contemporaries such as Ben Frost and Nicolas Jaar, made clear by the emotive pauses and cinematic stretches of abrasion throughout Epoch Sinus, though it's hardly derivative.
Schnell has said that "the music was making [her], not the other way round," on this record, a fact that feels apparent in the frank nature of the instrumentation throughout the album.
