Untied by Languis

Six-year transplants to Los Angeles from Buenos Aires, Alejandro Cohen and Marcos Chloca are Languis.

Languis conceives mental images via melodies and moods. They construct sonics that interact, much like color and shape evolve and dissolve in paintings. Their melodic warmness is a signature that they developed through songwriting and experimentation in the studio. The depth and richness of their sound creates its own universe of emotions that are hard to pinpoint, but shows clear influences from rock, pop, noise, and electronic music. Vocals interact in it, mostly like any other instrument, often mixed in the back and precisely unclear. Their work is a lucid example of their relationship, where they each play guitars, synthesizers, and vocals, but never quite agree on the results.

“Untied”, their upcoming album, is about songs and abstractions, soundscapes and melodies, silence and noise. In “Untied”, Languis presents a world where unlikely elements are combined and recombined in a seemingly random but organized instrumentation. Distortion and walls of reverbs lay upon chord progressions and vocals, and synthesizers recall past decades of electronic music, making it all an album that entraps and reacts to new music making.

A decade’s worth of collaboration has yielded 3 LPs and 3 singles that capture the dual nature of the surroundings of life. Each release has demonstrated the complexity and simplicity which immerses daily motions and emotions.

Languis has performed live with Mouse on Mars, Arab Strap, Dntel, Kid 606, Blectum From Blechdom, Nobody, dj hoseh, Pulse Programming, Sutekh, OST, Safety Scissors, Marumari, Scanner, and many others. Languis performs frequently in Los Angeles and San Francisco and soon look to tour Europe.

AMG EXPERT REVIEW: On Untied, Languis' fourth full-length album, the duo continues to move their sound forward, inching closer toward the glitch sound of their California peers such as Kid 606 and Matmos, yet still embracing their post-rock roots. Marcos Chloca and Alejandro Cohen absolutely submerse the album in dense layers of soft, gentle noise — flickering static, buzzing silence, phasing synth, tapping percussion, droning ambience — and do so in a seamless manner, all of this noise harmonizing into a massive wall of sound. Yet the wall-like noise never becomes poignant or even unsettling; rather, it's surprisingly comforting, even blissful at times. Furthermore, Chloca and Cohen space out the 50-minute album meticulously, opening with the subtle "Waterfall," followed by the standout vocal track "Touch a Cloud," and then progressively heading toward challenging IDM before turning full circle for "Night Collider," the album's other standout moment. Like "Touch a Cloud," this song employs a hushed vocal. It also features a simple acoustic guitar rhythm, making it perhaps the most shimmering song on the album because it seems so bare and ordinary amid such experimentation. From here the duo heads toward the album-closing "Strip Me out of My Time," a staggering 12-minute epic that summarizes everything characteristic of Languis. The duo's past albums had similarly been impressively unique and visionary, yet Untied stands apart for seemingly paradoxical reasons: it's both simpler and more ambitious. By keeping the album relatively brief and most of the songs around the same three- to four-minute length, Languis has fashioned Untied as a traditional pop/rock album; the careful positioning of the vocal tracks and the epic album-capper further this sense. However, as simple as Untied seems, it's actually a leap forward for the duo, who quietly continues to inch from post-rock to IDM by embracing the laptop-production style of their California glitch peers. — Jason Birchmeier

Check our Youtube channel at: youtube.com/user/languis