Brussels-based musician, photographer and lifeguard Roméo Poirier (aka Swim Platførm), makes sleek, subaqueous electro-acoustic music. His debut SURFACES EP was a soundtrack to four of Roméo's favourite swimming pools. These songs glide in and out of earshot, bustling like miniature engines, finely tuned and rhythmically confounding. They echo the factory sampling work of YMO on Technodelic: industrial but somehow good-natured, a symbiosis of machinery and wildlife - like an artificial reef or propeller blades smothered in algae. The gorgeous follow up tape, Plage Arrière, is an ode to eight Greek beaches. Poirier's palette here is vast: a swell of strings and electronics plunging fathoms deep amongst the clicks and whirrs of creatures unknown.
For his third record on Kit and first vinyl release, Kystwerk, Roméo joins forces with the poet Lars Haga Raavand, on a sonic expedition that traces the serrated coastline of Norway and briny depths of the North Sea. Coastal field recordings intertwine with submerged electronics; discordant, Copland-esque brass emerges, like some menacing flotsam, and mesmerising tows of piano chords recall the disjointed harmonies of Jonny Greenwood or Murcof. Then, to cement the trance, Raavand lilts and enounces delicately, before he too is swallowed up.