Some questions become easier when you zoom out. Others only become more frightening. On Unanswered, Francesco Virgilio’s multidisciplinary project mokroïé travels from the scale of stars and mortality to teenage sadness and personal grief, only to discover that the universe outside us and the one inside us can be equally difficult to understand.
That journey is deliberately divided into two halves. ‘Outside’ looks towards nature, space and existence; ‘Inside’ turns towards adolescence, memory and loss. Across just four tracks, the EP moves from the almost incomprehensibly vast to something painfully human without pretending either perspective offers straightforward answers.
Instrumental opener ‘Eternity’ immediately establishes the larger scale. Sparkling electronics collide with organic textures as Virgilio explores the fundamental contradiction between our instinct to live and the inevitability that life ends. Rather than making mortality sound oppressive, however, there is wonder within the arrangement. Earth and cosmos appear connected rather than separated.
‘Over The Clouds’ initially offers something gentler. Serene electronic textures create the sensation of drifting above ordinary concerns before darkness gradually enters the composition. Its eventual arrival at ethereal piano feels comforting without becoming conclusive, less an answer than somewhere peaceful to sit with the question.
Then Unanswered turns inward.
‘Teenage Sunday Sadness’ is particularly effective because its melancholy doesn’t require a dramatic cause. Carefree brightness gradually gives way to an inexplicable emotional heaviness, capturing something recognisable about adolescence: the ability to feel everything enormously while not necessarily understanding why.
It provides an important bridge to ‘Negative Space’, where absence becomes painfully specific. Australian artist Alison Thom supplies the EP’s only vocal performance, floating above ethereal electro-pop and delicate orchestral arrangements as the track considers the space somebody leaves behind.
The whispered French phrase “l’attente d’un retour”, waiting for a return, contains the song’s central ache. Grief is represented not simply by what has disappeared, but by the strange persistence of expectation after it has gone.
Virgilio’s visual work expands those ideas further. Each track is accompanied by its own film, with cosmic dust, enormous skies, human bodies, rain and fragments of everyday existence operating as extensions of the music rather than decorative accompaniments. The effect reinforces mokroïé’s identity as something broader than a conventional electronic project; Virgilio works almost like a director for whom synthesiser, instrument, image and narrative are simply different materials.
That multidisciplinary instinct has long shaped mokroïé, but Unanswered gives it an especially coherent purpose. Progressive electronics, psychedelic textures, orchestration and organic instrumentation continually shift scale alongside the subject matter.
Ultimately, the EP’s title isn’t a problem waiting to be solved. It is its conclusion. From mortality to unexplained teenage melancholy and the absence left by someone we love, mokroïé recognises that some of the experiences defining human existence resist neat explanation. Unanswered doesn’t try to make sense of them.
Instead, it finds beauty in continuing to ask.
