Immortal Mirth – enereph (2024) – Album Review

Album: Immortal Mirth

Artist: enereph

Release Date: June 10, 2024

Label: NAGA

I met enereph through a very close friend of mine in the summer of 2023 and saw her perform a striking live set at Azøth Space – which was a fitting venue for me personally because it was one of the darkest points of my life and anyone who knows Azoth know that it’s a perfect place to wallow in your own despair. Anyway, that particular set had a lot of blinking lights and deep modulation – but where she really caught my attention was during a livestreamed set in 2022 where she performed a long piece centered around the kalimba, an instrument I have a particular fondness for. Suffice to say, it’s clear enereph approaches music as an ongoing process of artistic evolution, and I’m here for it.

This album really unsettled me, but I think it’s because I was expecting something a little different. And that’s why I like it. The album is very organic, yet those organic elements are rearranged through a digital framework that gives the music a sharp, almost severe edge – it’s borderline brutal. You can hear the humanity in this album and it often feels as though something deeply personal is pressing outward through the electronic structures that contain it.

Track 2 “Carved Nephrite” is a perfect example. It starts as if maybe this what someone heard in their childhood at night when they fell asleep – something resembling distant insects or the low mechanical buzz of an unfamiliar creature – something that clearly shouldn’t exist. And that’s exactly what this album sounds like – the discovery of a new subset of brutish beasts that occupy a planet of nothing but marshland and despair. A strange ecosystem of sounds emerging from murky terrain, where organic life and mechanical resonance share the same uneasy habitat.

The soundscapes of this album carry the hazy quality of auditory fragments someone might half-hear while drifting into a long, deep sleep. Which, thankfully, means it’s all in my head. Beyond the atmosphere, the production is razor sharp. We look forward to more of enereph‘s work as time goes on.

Definitely give this a listen.