mokroïé’s ‘Unanswered’ EP moves from cosmic wonder to private grief across four tracks, closing with Howlite’s Alison Thom
The universe is incomprehensibly large. Grief can make a single empty room feel just as infinite. That shifting sense of scale gives mokroïé‘s Unanswered much of its emotional power. Across four tracks, Francesco Virgilio moves from stars, nature and mortality towards adolescence, absence and longing, gradually shrinking the physical world while somehow making the questions feel larger.
The EP is deliberately divided into two halves, Outside and Inside. Yet the cleverness of Unanswered lies in how quickly that distinction begins to collapse. Looking into space and looking into yourself might appear like opposite activities, but Virgilio treats both as encounters with things we struggle to fully understand.
Instrumental opener ‘Eternity’ begins at the widest possible angle. Sparkling electronics meet organic instrumentation as Virgilio considers the instinct to live alongside the certainty that life ends. Rather than making mortality oppressive, however, the track carries genuine wonder. Humanity feels tiny within its surroundings, but being tiny doesn’t necessarily make existence insignificant.
‘Over The Clouds’ initially continues that luminosity before uncertainty begins creeping into its edges. Its eventual ethereal piano feels comforting without providing any definitive resolution. That distinction matters throughout Unanswered: Virgilio offers moments of peace, but rarely pretends peace and certainty are the same thing.
Then the camera turns inward. ‘Teenage Sunday Sadness’ exchanges cosmic questions for something apparently smaller: the unexplained melancholy of adolescence. Yet it might be the EP’s most recognisably human moment. Brightness gradually gives way to sadness without requiring some dramatic catastrophe to justify it. Sometimes melancholy simply arrives.
By ‘Negative Space’, the universe has contracted to the absence of one person. Alison Thom of Howlite provides the EP’s only vocal performance, floating through ethereal electronics and delicate orchestration as the track examines the peculiar architecture of grief: the way somebody can be gone yet continue occupying enormous emotional space.
The whispered “l’attente d’un retour”, waiting for a return, captures that contradiction beautifully. Absence becomes a form of presence.
Virgilio’s accompanying films deepen this movement between scales. Cosmic dust, vast skies and human figures sit alongside rain-soaked landscapes and fragments of ordinary existence, reinforcing mokroïé’s position somewhere between electronic music project and audiovisual cinema.
That multidisciplinary approach never feels decorative. Virgilio works less like a producer adding visuals to finished songs than a director constructing scenes from sound, texture and image simultaneously.
Most importantly, Unanswered resists the temptation implied by its own subject matter. There is no final revelation explaining mortality, adolescent sadness or why somebody’s absence can reshape the world around us.
Instead, mokroïé finds an unexpected connection between looking towards the stars and staring at the empty space somebody once occupied. Both can make you feel impossibly small. Both can remind you how extraordinary it is that you were here to feel anything at all.
Listen to mokroïé ‘Unanswered’
