Foreign Devices

Pamela Martinez - Self-Titled EP
CD Review from Sonic Heart, June 2005 issue

Okay, sure. First impression is that Pamela Martinez is doing butterfly strokes through Bjork's end of the pool. This is due to a certain vocal weightlessness and melodic riskiness. A minute and a half into the first song on her new EP one quickly remembers that you can only get so much mileage out of comparisons before a work honestly must be dealt with on its own terms. The sonic palette stretches across a wide span of temperatures, from warm resin-caked strings to frosty electronics. Meanwhile Pamela's voice glistens down the resulting corridors of ice and earth like some sort of disembodied sorceress. The album contains four songs in total. The first three could be tone poems told from the p.o.v. of a kite wafting across a bed of refrigerated circuit boards as synapses spark through the troposphere. Gravity is toyed with and time is perverted. The epic-length final song, "Foreign Devices (Remix Balanc3d)," is a desperate pursuit across an existential terrain of broken Atari 2600 video games embedded in ice. Sort of an arctic nod to that prototypal chase sequence, Pink Floyd's "On the Run." The vocals are used more as a smear of background shadow than as a central narration. Ms Martinez and crew are talented weavers of sound. I recommend listening to this album in a dim, candlelit room, preferably with a strong aroma of wood.