Audiopile Review: Between “Jazz Codes”, last year’s lauded collaboration with Ulla, and her late-2024 2LP behemoth “Intrinsic Rhythm”, Perila has been keeping us incredibly well-fed. Now she returns with The Air Outside Feels Crazy Right Now, a collection that deepens her intimate, all-encompassing sense of atmosphere. Evoking the arid textures of her earlier work, Perila seamlessly blends the textured ambient drift found in much of aforementioned collaborator Ulla’s music with the patient pacing of Ana Roxanne and the spectral hauntology of Grouper. Gauzy vocals—often whispered—drift through a haze of reverb-drenched guitar loops and delicate keys, conjuring a ghostly presence that feels both close and far away. There’s a gentle, pastoral hum to the ambiance. Fans of Old Saw’s ambient-folk will feel right at home in these slow-moving soundscapes. Touches of slowcore peek through the fog, while soft glitches flicker in and out of focus. It’s more proof that Perila’s relentless recent output isn’t just prolific; it’s consistently remarkable. Please, keep them coming.

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Billed as a sequel to 2022’s ‘7.37/2.11’, ‘The air outside…’ diffuses its predecessor’s ambiguous synthscapes with loose-limbed slowcore improvisations, prioritising vulnerability and falibility. RIYL Laila Sakini, Grouper, Bianca Scout or Ulla.

If Perila’s immense, immersive double album ‘Intrinsic Rhythm’ was too much to swallow in one sitting, this one’s a little more digestible. The prolific Berlin-based assembled ‘The air outside…’ from sessions recorded between 2021 and 2023, but they play remarkably coherently, revealing a more fragile, serendipitous side of her personality. Made mostly using guitar and voice, it’s music that’s not overthought or overproduced, as if we’re getting a direct line into Perila’s reality – even the title betrays its unpretentious approach. On opener ‘Over Me’, Perila loops reversed guitar notes, picking out a rough, detuned bassline and barely singing. Her faded voice mouthes out a wordless, improvised lullaby descends into a well, reverberating as she stumbles across the notes. Not ambient exactly, it’s more like evaporated, decelerated post-rock – day zero Grouper crossed with Bark Psychosis.

And that description holds on ‘Barefeeter’, even when Perila switches to piano, playing unsteady, muted phrases as the room rattles around her. A song begins to materialize as she sings textured coos, but never completely emerges. ‘Gooshy’ is more surprising still, playing out like Jandek with dissonant strums that quiver around dissociated vocal expressions, and on ‘Fossil’, she uses the same philosophy without resorting to live instrumentation, disrupting oozed pads and whisper-singing over the horizontal soundscape.

-Boomkat