by Gianluigi Marsibilio (@GMarsibilio)
Thanya Iyer and her experimental art-pop were structured on the visions of Kind, an album from 2020. However, the new EP, Rest, is an artistic passage that deserves to be shared and deepened. It is not a sonic reset but a moment of pause and soulful reflection.
Fifteen minutes of refined songs, Iyer’s minimalist pop manages to be complete, overflowing with emotions and sensations. Rest is a sensory experience based on minimal and simple sounds. The new EP renders even more immediate an aesthetic, which in the previous album's songs was structured on sound mechanisms that were slightly more baroque, though equally meaningful.
Rest is an anechoic chamber in which we find ourselves hearing everything that goes on in our bodies, our thoughts, and even those we would like to push away but which are part of us. Listening to Rest is a plural experience; Pessoa recalled - through even his literary alter egos - that he was 'plural, like the universe'. The multiplicity of Rest begins and is structured around the disc's central question: "who am I when it all stops?" A question that conceals an ethical and communal quest.
The height of delicacy and aesthetic form is reached in songs such as “Float On” or through the words of “I Hope I See You Soon”. As the philosopher, Emil Cioran sometimes recalled, 'Renunciation is the only kind of action that is not degrading'. Rest is an album that leads us to meditate on our surrender, on the continual unnecessity of being in motion. Sometimes, it is necessary to first ask ourselves who we really are.