Celer, “Capri (Remastered Deluxe Edition)” (Two Acorns, 2026)
First issued back in 2009 as the inaugural release from Berlin’s short-lived Humming Conch label, Capri is one of the more polarizing highlights from the project’s early years, as it is a bit of a stylistic outlier. While released the same year as Danielle Baquet-Long’s untimely passing, these pieces feel like a ghostly and gently psychotropic transmission from a much happier time, as Will and Dani recorded this album in a single room over a series of summer nights during a residency on the Mediterranean island of Capri. Assembled using a modest yet eclectic palette of organetto, piano, strings, horns, acoustic guitar, and Dani’s field recordings from the island, the album is billed as a concept album/”idyllic imagining” collaged from “fragmented vignettes, brief moments, and suspended shimmers” and it certainly delivers on that promise, as it primarily resembles a series of brief and hallucinatory mirages. Given that, Capri feels very much like a languorous and impressionistic haze of shifting moods and scenes rather than a batch of substantial compositions, but these pieces cumulatively cast quite a mesmerizing and unique spell.
This expanded edition of Capri is its first physical reissue since its initial release, but I believe most of the added pieces previously surfaced digitally back in 2012 after Stephan Mathieu remastered the album for an intended triple LP release that was reluctantly abandoned due to high production costs. After a decade-plus delay, however, those triple LP dreams have finally been realized (along with a double CD format) and this new incarnation includes seven pieces that had to be cut from the original CD due to time restrictions.
Until now, I was only familiar with Capri‘s original incarnation, so roughly a quarter of the album was entirely new to me. While a few of the those previously absent pieces (“Falling in Trickles” and “Swimming, and Belief”) admittedly rank among the album’s strongest moments, the bulk of Capri can be reasonably described as variations on just a couple of themes, so the inclusion of additional material is less about the merits of any individual pieces than it is about restoring a whole to its intended shape and sustaining the album’s beguiling durational spell a bit longer (though I will note that the remastering has certainly improved the album as well).
In a rough sense, there are essentially two different types of pieces on Capri: shimmering and unsettling organ drones and slow-motion, reverb-soaked piano reveries like “Bracelets Passed To Spanish Hands.” Many of the pieces tend to be quite brief as well, so the album is essentially a series of moody, dreamlike, and ephemeral vignettes that evoke a heat haze of sensory impressions like island breezes, “decayed dwellings set against pristine resorts, and the deep colors of the Blue Grotto.” Filtered through Celer’s sensibility, an island primarily known for its stunning natural beauty, extravagant hotels, and luxury boutique shopping is transformed into a mysterious, haunted, and subtly unsettling dreamstate of flickering beauty mingled with shadowy and unsettling dissonances.
The latter is perhaps exemplified by the gently oscillating hum of “Listen To the Inverted Sounds, Falling,” which feels like tendrils of an enchanted fog drifting in through an open sea-side window, but my favorite piece is probably the elegantly pulsing and shimmering heaven of the all-too-brief “Ascensionaires.” In general, however, the true beauty and magic of Capri lies in how the album feels like an abstract and immersive yet ephemeral and elusive travel diary in which images and memories teasingly flicker and shimmer into being for a delicious instant only to quickly dissolve back into dream-mist again. As such, Capri is something of a fascinating unicorn within Celer’s vast discography, as it does not necessarily rank among their top-tier releases, yet still feels like one of the project’s more essential statements due to its uniquely bleary sense of disorienting unreality, unusual structure, and vivid evocation of a specific time and place that can never be recaptured.
Listen here.
