Genre: Ambient/Electroacoustic/Experimental

Track Listing:

01 Falter
02 Cloud Suspect
03 Traumaland
04 Malbaie
05 Swarm Furies
06 Door Mere
07 Motel Ana Gogini
08 Creep
09 Song for Charlotte

Rita Galetti, a “sound artist” who also plays guitar, hails from up northward, in Canada. She’s just released, for German indie label, Contra Musik Production, her debut CD, entitled Falter and it’s a heavenly body of sound. With nine seamless cuts on it, it grows on one, with the drone /ambient /guitar noodlings and such; just the sort of stuff one expects from this genre.

The nine songs on Falter are not too long, the first two just a minute and about two minutes, respectively (“Falter” and “Cloud Suspect”), however, they get progressively longer as the album goes on. Track #3, “Traumaland”, is a haunting, guitar-laden snapshot of a wet, rainy night in an old urban town square, such as London or Glasgow, but where the throngs of people are all shuttered up inside, in the cozy warmth of their flats. But someone’s out on the prowl: lurking or strolling or whatnot, through the newly wet streets of a dark, architecturally gothic city. It’s got samples of rain falling down and the wind blowing it around, etc., plus the atmospheric tuneage that accompanies it along with a quiet, searching, mellow guitar, giving voice to the undercurrent of the droning ambience of the song.

One thing that’s unusual about Rita Galetti and her music is that it’s just not that prevalent among the experimental/drone/electronica crowd for women to be out there, creating the sounds, writing the music and performing them. For some reason, it’s always been a “man’s world” to quote the late, great James Brown; you don’t see too many CDs conceived, written and/or performed by females, although there’s really no reason why. I guess it’s almost a cliché that women are more prone to listening to bubble gum pop and gooey romantic crooning, a la Coldplay and Morrissey and more of that ilk or else on the total opposite end of the spectrum - especially young girls who, in order to stand out and piss their parents off, listen to NIN, Nitzer Ebb, Einsturzende Neubauten, etc,. But there really is no reason that women can’t be just as innovative and unique in coming up with music that is nowhere near anything else that their peers are playing or listening to.

Sure, there are a lot of “grrl” punk groups from the US, like Sleater-Kinney, Heavens to Betsy, The Spells or Quasi, that have an angry punk edge to them, which translates into loud, thrashing music fronted by scream-o vocals. It may not be the world’s best music, but it does force the spotlight onto these women who know how to rock and will not take a back seat to their male counterparts and can be just as corrosive and inflammatory.

But beyond the faux anger and the nihilism-dabbling, musicians such as Rita Galetti show that you don’t have to be as obnoxious as men when it comes to being original and not getting stuck in that “female ghetto” that the corporate media loves to gush over.

Anyway, what I noticed that really sticks out here, on Falter, is the use of the guitar to add to the drone and the mud-soaked fumigated air hose atmospherics. Whether it’s just jingle-jangling over the ambience or using the guitar in an experimental, well-thought out way or just bringing a particular song back to life after a long spell of meditation-melancholia, it is a nice touch, one that I find lacking in many of Galetti’s contemporaries. So, you see, maybe having a female around, for once, doing this kind of music is something that should be utilized more. Of course, there are no doors closed to them, this is the 21st century, after all; it’s all about choice and even though I know there are plenty of female fans of this genre, they just don’t seem to be there in the trenches building up and making curiouser and curiouser what their male counterparts seem to be driving into an unmoving, rock of Gibraltar that needs some fresh injections every now and then so as to keep it “experimental”- because if everyone’s doing it, then it’s really not so experimental anymore, is it?