Mauro Remiddi, who currently records as Porcelain Raft, has covered an impressive amount of physical and aesthetic terrain in his years as a working musician. Italian-born Remiddi's wanderings have led him to playing indie pop in London, gypsy klezmer music with the traveling Berlin Youth Circus, piano in off-Broadway productions, and even to performing in North Korea.
Considering how much globetrotting Remiddi has under his belt, it's no surprise that his music might start to evoke a sense of rootlessness and impermanence. However, as Porcelain Raft, he's taken it to the logical extreme of sounding like he no longer exists on this planet. On Strange Weekend, Porcelain Raft's debut full-length effort, Remiddi sounds like nothing if not a weary sojourner resigned to endlessly floating through the interstellar or spiritual cosmos. His forerunners in this respect are Marc Bolan, John Lennon, and David Bowie, performers who consistently sought some kind of transcendence of the corporeal, struggling to achieve earthly connections and understanding while chafing against the bounds of time and space.
Song titles like "Drifting in and Out", "Shapeless & Gone", and "Put Me to Sleep" give an excellent idea of what Remiddi has in store. Porcelain Raft borrows liberally from both the shoegaze and dream-pop playbooks, and so we get layers of sonic gauze shot through with delicately strummed acoustic guitar patterns and Remiddi's reedy, rather androgynous voice. In the spacey somnolence applied to venerable classic rock sounds and structures-- Lennon's most obviously on "Unless You Speak From Your Heart", Bolan's on "Picture"-- Remiddi very much shares a kinship with Beach House. There's some of Porcelain Raft touring partner M83's elegant sweep here too, while the woozy, hypnotic beatscapes of "Is It Deep Enough For You" and "If You Have a Wish" aren't far removed at all from chillwavers like Neon Indian. Many of the melodies feel familiar but can't easily be precisely placed, which not only makes them good earworm candidates but also enhances the album's dreamlike, half-remembered feel.
The record's pervading sense of wistfulness and resignation extends to the lyrics-- they're often buried or abstracted, but occasionally something nakedly direct emerges, like the ingenuous sentiment conveyed in the title of "Unless You Speak From Your Heart", or, perhaps a bit more artfully, Remiddi's assertion in "Backwords" that "I hope you're in a nice hotel/ Playing cards in your room/ With someone who cares over you."
As you'd expect from such a bleary, atmospheric album, Strange Weekend hangs together well as a whole-cloth statement, though that doesn't mean there aren't standouts, particularly "Backwords", with its exhausted grandeur reminiscent of Pink Floyd, as well as the gorgeous "Put Me to Sleep", which seems tailor-made to soundtrack a scene where Carey Mulligan is sad in some major metropolitan city. Which is presumably a situation to which a well-traveled melancholic like Remiddi can readily relate.
