Mem1: Alexipharmaca

With artwork by the man behind Svarte Greiner and a conceptual framework dealing with "plant and animal poisons and their antidotes," Alexipharmaca is an album that wouldn't be out of place on Type. The Los Angeles based Mem1 is a duo comprised of Mark & Laura Cetilia, employing plenty of high-tech gadgets to abstract, obfuscate, and accompany the languid sounds from Laura's cello. Softened drones and delicate atmospheres are the dominant structures for Alexipharmaca, certainly casting a long gaze back to Erik Satie's idea of wallpaper music through the lens of Brian Eno's ambient and Akira Rabelais' esoteric digital abstractions. The movements of the bow across the strings of the cello are sometimes all that remains, as the rest of the sounds have been rarified, pitch-shifted, softly mulched, and recast as a ghostly undulation of sound crosshatched with digital ephemera and microsonic pin-pricks of glitchiness. While many of the quietly rendered sounds enjoy a jewel-like preciousness, Mem1 infuse these passages with a ghostly bleakness that occasionally grows ominous.

– Aquarius Records (2006)