By Paige Taylor
wearsthetrousers.com

Watching a fly crawl across a white table in a cafeteria may seem ordinary, but believe me it's not, not when you are listening to Rio En Medio's 'Venus Of Willendorf'. Then it is like watching the opening scene of a Hitchcock murder, as if you're trapped in the middle between the half-human fly and a murky pond. Frontier is the second album from Rio En Medio, the brainchild of Minerva-like artist Danielle Stech-Homsy and a revolving cast of friends, and could indeed be the soundtrack to a thriller, perhaps narrated by an affected poetry teacher from Stanford or Santa Fé. Poetry is free thought cut and bound, and Frontier began as a series of interrelated poems written with a purpose: that is, to be compiled with other visual and philosophical art, and of course, music. Her songs (which are "hers" as much as Russia belongs to the bourgeoisie) pour out of guitars, drums and eerily processed musical saw like steaming iron ore into a crackling mould. Rhyme is executed with a deliciously slow beat.
Hailing from the American Southwest, Stech-Homsy's motifs of alienation, the sacred and the resistance of time itself seem born from beneath the heavy silence of a wintry desert. Despite this isolated upbringing, Frontier is a strong-lunged otherworldly child, vital and blood red with exposure. Stech-Homsy's lyrics in 'The Diamond Wall' – echoed by what might well be mosque prayers – lead a march as treacherous as it sounds: "tears like shells / tears like shells / breaking down the diamond wall / splinter where they splash and fall…" Gathering pools of mystical allusion melt away with each new song, shattered apart by the meter as much as they are contained within it. (Consider 'Stars Are', a 40-second song of jabber and cuts of see-saw vocal integration.) And when 'The Diamond Wall' ultimately ends in blissful chanting (Latin?), the listener is led away as innocent as a lamb to the slaughter, forgetting the fear they just experienced.
Frontier is beautifully dreary, almost terrorising in its sheer escapism. 'The Umbrella', the album's highlight, is sliced by laser beams and clattering weirdness. "My heart went out in spring / I was empty, and I couldn't hold you / 'cause I couldn't feel a thing," Stech-Homsy sings in a voice that's lifted by hands that are not her own, more likely belonging to the eternal spirit that haunts her songs. Instruments hold their line, but bend it at the same time to allow a perverse freedom to inhabit the song. Frontier's ability to make time seem obsolete is a personification of the disappearing road: two parallel lines lessening the distance between themselves as they travel toward a northern horizon.
Not all Stech-Homsy's notes are .., unfortunately, as in 'The Last Child's Tear' when the voice loses pitch often, unfaltering but painful to hear. Flat soprano is Frontier's only fault, though, and the only plausible folly in this experimental land where relativity rules. After a minute of soliloquy in 'The Last Child's Tear', the music disappears until a beat reminiscent of The Postal Service's 'The District Sleeps Alone Tonight' rebirths the lyrics: "I saw five hundred lions waiting to drown here… / how did they get here?"
A frontier is a space between, as is a 'rio en medio', and the vacuum can only be filled by eternal kinetics. Like Zeno's paradoxes of motion, the journey is endless. The conspirators who join Stech-Homsy on stage with paint, guitars and tools are theoretically infinite also, and Frontier sounds accordingly like an altruistic world of sensual artistry sprung from Rio En Medio's magical Pandora's box.