Audiopile Review: Sferic breezes into 2025 with their first release of the year after 2024 standouts from both Bianca Scout and 990x, offering us the debut album for Any, the Montreal-based harpist Anastasia Patellis. Linking up with producer LA Timpa, the old world classicism of Patellis’ harp comes to head-to-head with LA Timpa’s post-production reconstructions that have been at the bleeding edge of experimental pop and R&B. Framing her fragile baroque compositions and bedroom pop sketches in a lattice work of stunted beats, muddled bass and sepia-hazed ambiance, the duo dovetail their opposing approaches in a blissed meeting of the old world meeting the new. Certain to strike a chord with fans of Astrid Sonne’s lowlit pop, not to mention current fixations of ours like the classically trained musicians CTM and Vanessa Bedoret, who have been inverting their craft in exciting and refreshing ways. Edition of 300.

Downbeat, dreamy charm by Greco-Canadian debutee Any, coming outta nowhere with a quietly compelling blend of harps and ohrwurm hooks including co-production and chops by Klein/Lolina spar LA Timpa. Think Astrid Sonne and Tirzah on the terrace with Sissi Rada, and sink into that warm embrace pronto.

Greco-Canadian artist Any was bedding down in a Cretan squat when the album’s title, μέγα ελεός in Greek, boomed from loudspeakers next to a bonfire, courtesy of a midnight Orthodox church sermon. Moving to the sunny, ancient island had provided her with an escape from big city burnout, but she ended staying far longer than expected – years rather than months. It’s this prolonged sense of suspension that provides the album with its wandering spirit, using harp as an emotional core.

Listening to Breton music made on the Celtic harp from artists like Kristen Noguès and Alan Stivell, Any sketched out song outlines that were then tweaked by Lagos-born, Toronto-raised journeyman LA Timpa, who flew out to Crete last summer to put his idiosyncratic stamp on the record. Like the dusty songs on Astrid Sonne’s ‘Great Doubt, ‘MEGA MERCY’ sounds as if its drum line was duped on dictaphone from an old beat tape, then spliced with field recordings and vocals.

Half sung, half spoken, she murmurs around the beat, not exactly over it, adding circuitous, boss-tuned harp twangs when necessary. It’s music that’s spartan rather than lo-fi; a sort of bare-bones reaction to electroacoustic experimentation and outsider folk. It makes perfect sense that an artist as thematically on-point as LA Timpa is involved – Any’s instrumental vamps are roughly pasted around pinprick boom-bap snaps and crunchy foley denouements, eventually cooled into contemplative Nala Sinephro-esque meditations.

Sections bring to mind Tirzah’s most psychedelic early excursions, with dry asides set against a slurping, off-axis beatbox loop and distant, barely-audible synths. The record is tied up on ‘WEATHER LIKE TIDE’, an instrumental callback to the opener, book-ending the album with a melancholy, humid kinda ambient folk, purposefully melting the timeline.