About

"Brussels-based composer Christina Vantzou has made a name for herself by being unassuming. In collaboration with Stars of the Lid’s Adam Wiltzie, she made up half of the Dead Texan, whose 2004 collection of noisy vignettes supposedly stemmed from aborted SotL pieces. These sketches were too aggressive to fit in with Wiltzie’s main project and Vantzou, who was then best known as a maker of bleary short films, stepped in. The Dead Texan’s music was all loops and whorls, more intent on grabbing your attention than SotL’s work but still grounded in the monochromatic haze that Vantzou would go on to explore in her visual art and in solo material. Her new solo album, No. 2, underscores her commitment to subtle composition..."

"...No. 2  takes the gauzy, filmic work that made up Vantzou’s first release and homes in on the emotionally engaging details. Even with its expanded instrumental palette and larger string section, its small moments that give her music a new diversity. Vantzou’s bedtime symphonies have been fleshed out with the addition of woodwinds and a more dynamic use of her voice, and “Sister” in particular stands out for its foreboding clarinet swells in the midst of an album heavily reliant on a glacial string section." - Pitchfork 

 “…this is instrumental music, ambient music, with thrust and purpose, as beautiful as the colours dancing over tired eyes on a prolonged train ride, their owner lost in these moments. It can creep out the listener, too – ‘Brain Frog’ is a number which sets icy screech against sheets of rising squall, akin to someone like Brian Eno washing up against a landscape framed by the early soundtracks of Elliot Goldenthal. Think Alien 3, without all the running around…”

“…Vantzou’s music isn’t of a kind that arrives unheralded – not only does her previous work set expectations for this collection, but the aforementioned Barwick, and the material of Nashville’s Hammock, are precursors, too. (Not to mention the earliest ambient experimentalists and contemporary classicists too numerous to list.) But that ‘No. 2’ doesn’t sing with a singular appeal does nothing to affect its exquisiteness. This is wordless music with weight and emotional pull enough to snap a drifting commuter to attention, to take it in like so few albums of its breed can be: as a work in and of itself, and not simply an accompaniment to a life lived at speed.” - Clash Music