Electronic Recap - March 2020
Artists Covered: Andrew Huang * Four Tet * Nicolas Jaar * Rob Clouth * 空隙
I apologise for the delay on this post, I think I definitely needed a slight break from what's been one of my busiest months on my blog ever. Here we go though, these are five very worthwhile new electronic albums...
"Ganglia"
Andrew Huang
22nd March 2020
Independent
The latest album from YouTube's most diverse musician is a slice of sharp, experimental techno and idm. It's an immersive experience that finds his signature quirky phrases at home within a chaotic landscape full of the unique details and tricks he's made a career off of excelling at.
As much as I enjoy the vast bulk of Andrew's music, I do feel like it's on his many albums that he can often fail to quite capture the same manic excitement found on the standout singles. On last year's Alabaster for example, he was often very successful at blending drum'n'bass with high octane synths and spectacularly modulated drumbeats, but there were a few songs that just felt out of place and redundant. Usually I find his albums to be perhaps too short, and it was unusual for Alabaster to have the number of tracks it did, but here on Ganglia it really feels like Andrew has found the perfect length in order to explore the boundaries of his instrumental themes and challenge the sounds he's working with to the point where the album comes across as definitive, complete and yet no less wild and exploratory as it should be.
Laser stabs and quick fire, seemingly random drum sounds dominate this album, at times devolving into difficult to follow and yet captivatingly insane passages of unpredictable confusion such as on the bizarre "Brainiac", a track pouring with ideas as the looping, chopped vocals make for a kind of grip to hold onto for not only us as listeners but also the mad modulation going on around it and providing the brilliance and electronic ingenuity that has come to define Andrew as a musician. He's never not creative in the way he goes about making music, and this album is yet another fascinating experience from which I'm left astonished by the level of thought and detail put into every single song.
Conclusively, I think this very well may be Andrew's best album to date, it's concise and precise, engaging and deranged, mold-breaking and brain-shaking. It may lack his beautiful vocals or witty rapping and it's easily some of his least conventional and accessible work, but that's not to say that this album isn't full of catchy refrains and unforgettable moments.
8/10
Best Tracks: Autoharp; Ganglia; Wireskip; London Nebula; Rainmaker; Megalomaniac
Worst Tracks: Rosa Molineux; Discs
"Sixteen Oceans"
Four Tet
13th March 2020
Text Records
It may not be the most distinguished, adventurous or richly textured of Keiran's many albums as Four Tet, but I'd make the argument that for as dismissive of his gradual submersion into ambience many critics are, it's still made up of the same fantastic melodies and winding instrumentals that make his music so special.
Choosing "School" as the opening track was, in my opinion, the perfect way to start off the record. It's a straightforward and captivating listen that feels direct and unmissable, laying things down with a catchy house beat and expanding things outwards with some gorgeous yet attention grabbing chimes that offer a more catchy side to the sounds of outdoor downtempo house that he continues to explore in a more ethereal fashion later on. It isn't misleading so much as it's misrepresentative of the album as a whole, operating as a gripping intro more than a framework for the album. Things are followed by the continuously outdoor sounds of the mellow yet danceable "Baby", a song that puts an Ellie Goulding vocal sample to the best use of her voice in years in order to create what would be the album's obvious standout if not for the inclusion of 2019 single "Teenage Birdsong", an impressive array of the ultra-melodic soundscapes of chimes, flutes and house beats that make up the bulk of this album, at their catchiest.
The two interludes occupy a peculiar spot in the middle of the album, offering an unnecessary break between two of the album's best songs without doing much to quantify their placement or existence. The former, "Hi Hello", feels like some brief experiment of Keiran's with trap music, whilst "ISTM" is a totally redundant forty seconds of minimal ambience that leads into the beautiful "Something in the Sadness", a song that manages to convey a whole lot of emotion through a tight, club like structure that highlights the flickering experimentation. It might lack the swell and payoff of a song like "Love Salad" but it's able to carry itself forward with it's own momentum without tripping over itself as it excitingly threatens to do due to the revolving, almost overlapping feeling of the beats.
For the most part, I can see where people criticising this album's ambience are coming from even though I predominantly disagree, but the song "Green" is my example of a full song that shares faults with the interludes; "Green" almost doesn't progress at all, with the pretty twinkling chimes feeling like part of a requirement of the album and not a choice for the benefit of the music. It's a point in the album where I question my own opinions around it, especially due to the frustrating interludes and lack of exploration and depth provided by the record this far on. Thankfully, "4T Recordings" picks up where the album left off in an admirable return to the excitement of early tracks without losing the atmosphere and abstractness of the later tracks. This is a very good album, but it's held back from greatness by the lack of focus and necessity that bogs down many of the songs in the latter half and I find myself just not caring about almost half of this album.
6.5/10
Best Tracks: School; Baby; Teenage Birdsong; Romantics; Love Salad; Insect Near Piha Beach; Mama Teaches Sanskrit
Worst Tracks: Hi Hello; Green
"Cenizas"
Nicolas Jaar
27th March 2020
Other People
Nicolas Jaar has made the pivot from rather abstract fusions of electronic subgenres towards the perplexing and shapeshifting atmospherics of a haunting and even more heady form of electroacoustic ambience.
Swirling synths often occupy only the backgrounds of this strange collection of songs, and if there is a recurring focal element then it's probably the brooding, lamenting vocals that quietly dominate on the slow crescendo of the title track. Elsewhere, free jazz compositions mesh with unexpected and disjointed synths whilst the drums may or may not play a key role in setting the mood or carrying a particular song to its end destination. Every song may compliment each other, but they operate as distinctly isolated and unique entries into a beautiful but confusing array of genreless meandering that works as well as it does due to Jaar's phenomenal production skills and ability to create some of the most introverted, resonant, abrasive, minimalistic and organic compositions all at once.
Take "Gocce" for example, a wonderfully non-directional and freeform soundscape driven by croaky drums and building into a chaotic yet still very internal jazz moment. This is followed by "Mud", another leftfield approach to an almost tribal song that might just be the most impressive and painfully emotional composition of his career to date, leapfrogging the static ambience that many of his peers struggle to transcend and boasting a simple yet commanding rhythm that helps drive the song further into its obscure and totally distant apex, a showcase of his knack for pushing sounds and melodies to the point of falling apart to elevate the tension and give the tone the unsettling edge that makes his music so individual and removed from all other musicians working anywhere close to the styles he casually blends.
This is Jaar's second album of the year, the first being 2017-2019 by his pseudonym Against All Logic. Where that propelled his wonderfully human and danceably retro funk and house into the future with an engaging tech house twist that was far less organic and much more energetic; although that album did a lot to enthrall and impress me, it lacks the textural depth and introspective edge that sends Cenizas over the edge for me. It's a truly phenomenal record, and one of the best the year has had to offer thus far.
9/10
Best Tracks: Vanish; Cenizas; Agosto; Gocce; Mud; Hello, Chain; Rubble; Faith Made of Silk
Worst Tracks: Menysid
"Zero Point"
Rob Clouth
12th March 2020
Mesh
It's very easy to miss the point (no pun intended) of this album. At surface level, Rob Clouth's complex rhythms and ultra-detailed approach to the fundamentally detailed and precise genre of IDM make for an impressive but cold and distant listen, something to admire for its technical mastery but not something to cherish for its holistically different take on the genre. In my opinion though, this is an album you have to envelop yourself in to understand the warmth of, even despite its often jarring and inaccessible qualities.
The pacing of this album is just one section this album excels at, as Rob allows the microrhythms and many melodies within a single track the time they need to build. It makes for an extremely satisfying experience when each time I listen to this album I pick up on new features and details and it's an amazing feeling when you get lost in the depths of the sounds at play here. He clearly is a master of sound design, finding consistently interesting ways to arrange and present the ideas he has in order to capture your attention and allude to what's coming next. It's unusual, the whirring sounds always backed up by a luscious pad or a melancholic piano, such as on the incredible "Casimir", a song that winds its way through several phases without losing either it's emotional core nor the experimental and exciting unpredictability that perpetuates this album.
The crescendos on the album are absolutely fantastic, courtesy of the orchestral instrumentation that pairs so well with the electronics and reveals the influence of neo-classical music in such a different environment. The result is a wholly grand experience, the weight of the arrangements and structure alone carrying just as much impact as that of the distorted and disorienting rhythms. Although this album was released through Max Cooper's own record label, there aren't many similarities to his own style of ambient techno here and, for as good as Max's last album was, I honestly don't see it holding up to the magnitude of this album's strengths.
To be honest, I find an album like this difficult to critique. I see no flaws in the production here, and it seems to me like Rob has achieved exactly what he wanted to; an expansive listening experience that unfolds itself in peculiar ways and makes for what I can only describe as a fully functioning concept album, taking you from the start of something (Dirac Sea Birth) right up to its end (Zero Point). I think it's open to interpretation as to what this lifetime concept is, but his intention was to represent the life of our universe. For me personally, I can see how that is intertwined with the music he's made and I think the tone is spot on for something of that scale. This is an album that thrives on thought, and if you give it a go I warn you it's not a passive listen.
9/10
Best Tracks: Casimir; Emerging From; The Vacuum State; A Shiver Sequence; Into; A Flickered;
Worst Tracks: Zero Point
"Hell Mix"
空隙
2nd March 2020
Geometric Lullaby
This is one of those deep dive Bandcamp discoveries I am thrilled to have made, having been immediately drawn to first the cover art, then the tone, and now the music itself.
Opening with what can only be described as the setup to an extraterrestrial themed horror film in a genuinely unsettling phone call with someone rambling in what you interpret as their final moments about population control and the government. It's this early instillation of paranoia and the chilling ambience of the music that sets you up for a record with more twists and turns than a rollercoaster, and it can be about as scary too. The synths loop in and out of focus between the horror movie strings and intermittent vocals for the first two tracks before the almost twelve minute "夢の国" switches things up with a much more confrontational drumbeat that's backed by more typical vaporwave-inspired synths, a remnant of 空隙 [Void]'s time as a partaker in that microgenre.
Void having featured on the renowned Hardvapour collection album a few years ago with the track "Faces" was my only pre-knowledge of this artist's work going into this album, but the direction they take things here on Hell Mix is just as much influenced by ambient, techno and drum'n'bass as it is vaporwave, just another example of an artist further expanding what was once an easy microgenre to pin down and subsequently criticise. I think that for as overlooked and easily forgotten as this album may be, it's yet another example of what makes the genre so diverse. There is such a variety of rhythms to latch onto, there's even one song that primarily features an acoustic guitar. This is great, even the bonus tracks (the latter of which feels somewhat ironic, but I still love it).
Because this album's only on Bandcamp, here's a link: https://geometriclullaby.bandcamp.com/album/hell-mix
8/10
Best Tracks: エイリアン; 夢の国; 한밤중; 월광; Lordship - Archangel; Lordship - Liturgy
Worst Tracks: 오아시스
---
Thank you very much for reading.
---
"Ganglia"
Andrew Huang
22nd March 2020
Independent
The latest album from YouTube's most diverse musician is a slice of sharp, experimental techno and idm. It's an immersive experience that finds his signature quirky phrases at home within a chaotic landscape full of the unique details and tricks he's made a career off of excelling at.
As much as I enjoy the vast bulk of Andrew's music, I do feel like it's on his many albums that he can often fail to quite capture the same manic excitement found on the standout singles. On last year's Alabaster for example, he was often very successful at blending drum'n'bass with high octane synths and spectacularly modulated drumbeats, but there were a few songs that just felt out of place and redundant. Usually I find his albums to be perhaps too short, and it was unusual for Alabaster to have the number of tracks it did, but here on Ganglia it really feels like Andrew has found the perfect length in order to explore the boundaries of his instrumental themes and challenge the sounds he's working with to the point where the album comes across as definitive, complete and yet no less wild and exploratory as it should be.
Laser stabs and quick fire, seemingly random drum sounds dominate this album, at times devolving into difficult to follow and yet captivatingly insane passages of unpredictable confusion such as on the bizarre "Brainiac", a track pouring with ideas as the looping, chopped vocals make for a kind of grip to hold onto for not only us as listeners but also the mad modulation going on around it and providing the brilliance and electronic ingenuity that has come to define Andrew as a musician. He's never not creative in the way he goes about making music, and this album is yet another fascinating experience from which I'm left astonished by the level of thought and detail put into every single song.
Conclusively, I think this very well may be Andrew's best album to date, it's concise and precise, engaging and deranged, mold-breaking and brain-shaking. It may lack his beautiful vocals or witty rapping and it's easily some of his least conventional and accessible work, but that's not to say that this album isn't full of catchy refrains and unforgettable moments.
8/10
Best Tracks: Autoharp; Ganglia; Wireskip; London Nebula; Rainmaker; Megalomaniac
Worst Tracks: Rosa Molineux; Discs
"Sixteen Oceans"
Four Tet
13th March 2020
Text Records
It may not be the most distinguished, adventurous or richly textured of Keiran's many albums as Four Tet, but I'd make the argument that for as dismissive of his gradual submersion into ambience many critics are, it's still made up of the same fantastic melodies and winding instrumentals that make his music so special.
Choosing "School" as the opening track was, in my opinion, the perfect way to start off the record. It's a straightforward and captivating listen that feels direct and unmissable, laying things down with a catchy house beat and expanding things outwards with some gorgeous yet attention grabbing chimes that offer a more catchy side to the sounds of outdoor downtempo house that he continues to explore in a more ethereal fashion later on. It isn't misleading so much as it's misrepresentative of the album as a whole, operating as a gripping intro more than a framework for the album. Things are followed by the continuously outdoor sounds of the mellow yet danceable "Baby", a song that puts an Ellie Goulding vocal sample to the best use of her voice in years in order to create what would be the album's obvious standout if not for the inclusion of 2019 single "Teenage Birdsong", an impressive array of the ultra-melodic soundscapes of chimes, flutes and house beats that make up the bulk of this album, at their catchiest.
The two interludes occupy a peculiar spot in the middle of the album, offering an unnecessary break between two of the album's best songs without doing much to quantify their placement or existence. The former, "Hi Hello", feels like some brief experiment of Keiran's with trap music, whilst "ISTM" is a totally redundant forty seconds of minimal ambience that leads into the beautiful "Something in the Sadness", a song that manages to convey a whole lot of emotion through a tight, club like structure that highlights the flickering experimentation. It might lack the swell and payoff of a song like "Love Salad" but it's able to carry itself forward with it's own momentum without tripping over itself as it excitingly threatens to do due to the revolving, almost overlapping feeling of the beats.
For the most part, I can see where people criticising this album's ambience are coming from even though I predominantly disagree, but the song "Green" is my example of a full song that shares faults with the interludes; "Green" almost doesn't progress at all, with the pretty twinkling chimes feeling like part of a requirement of the album and not a choice for the benefit of the music. It's a point in the album where I question my own opinions around it, especially due to the frustrating interludes and lack of exploration and depth provided by the record this far on. Thankfully, "4T Recordings" picks up where the album left off in an admirable return to the excitement of early tracks without losing the atmosphere and abstractness of the later tracks. This is a very good album, but it's held back from greatness by the lack of focus and necessity that bogs down many of the songs in the latter half and I find myself just not caring about almost half of this album.
6.5/10
Best Tracks: School; Baby; Teenage Birdsong; Romantics; Love Salad; Insect Near Piha Beach; Mama Teaches Sanskrit
Worst Tracks: Hi Hello; Green
"Cenizas"
Nicolas Jaar
27th March 2020
Other People
Nicolas Jaar has made the pivot from rather abstract fusions of electronic subgenres towards the perplexing and shapeshifting atmospherics of a haunting and even more heady form of electroacoustic ambience.
Swirling synths often occupy only the backgrounds of this strange collection of songs, and if there is a recurring focal element then it's probably the brooding, lamenting vocals that quietly dominate on the slow crescendo of the title track. Elsewhere, free jazz compositions mesh with unexpected and disjointed synths whilst the drums may or may not play a key role in setting the mood or carrying a particular song to its end destination. Every song may compliment each other, but they operate as distinctly isolated and unique entries into a beautiful but confusing array of genreless meandering that works as well as it does due to Jaar's phenomenal production skills and ability to create some of the most introverted, resonant, abrasive, minimalistic and organic compositions all at once.
Take "Gocce" for example, a wonderfully non-directional and freeform soundscape driven by croaky drums and building into a chaotic yet still very internal jazz moment. This is followed by "Mud", another leftfield approach to an almost tribal song that might just be the most impressive and painfully emotional composition of his career to date, leapfrogging the static ambience that many of his peers struggle to transcend and boasting a simple yet commanding rhythm that helps drive the song further into its obscure and totally distant apex, a showcase of his knack for pushing sounds and melodies to the point of falling apart to elevate the tension and give the tone the unsettling edge that makes his music so individual and removed from all other musicians working anywhere close to the styles he casually blends.
This is Jaar's second album of the year, the first being 2017-2019 by his pseudonym Against All Logic. Where that propelled his wonderfully human and danceably retro funk and house into the future with an engaging tech house twist that was far less organic and much more energetic; although that album did a lot to enthrall and impress me, it lacks the textural depth and introspective edge that sends Cenizas over the edge for me. It's a truly phenomenal record, and one of the best the year has had to offer thus far.
9/10
Best Tracks: Vanish; Cenizas; Agosto; Gocce; Mud; Hello, Chain; Rubble; Faith Made of Silk
Worst Tracks: Menysid
"Zero Point"
Rob Clouth
12th March 2020
Mesh
It's very easy to miss the point (no pun intended) of this album. At surface level, Rob Clouth's complex rhythms and ultra-detailed approach to the fundamentally detailed and precise genre of IDM make for an impressive but cold and distant listen, something to admire for its technical mastery but not something to cherish for its holistically different take on the genre. In my opinion though, this is an album you have to envelop yourself in to understand the warmth of, even despite its often jarring and inaccessible qualities.
The pacing of this album is just one section this album excels at, as Rob allows the microrhythms and many melodies within a single track the time they need to build. It makes for an extremely satisfying experience when each time I listen to this album I pick up on new features and details and it's an amazing feeling when you get lost in the depths of the sounds at play here. He clearly is a master of sound design, finding consistently interesting ways to arrange and present the ideas he has in order to capture your attention and allude to what's coming next. It's unusual, the whirring sounds always backed up by a luscious pad or a melancholic piano, such as on the incredible "Casimir", a song that winds its way through several phases without losing either it's emotional core nor the experimental and exciting unpredictability that perpetuates this album.
The crescendos on the album are absolutely fantastic, courtesy of the orchestral instrumentation that pairs so well with the electronics and reveals the influence of neo-classical music in such a different environment. The result is a wholly grand experience, the weight of the arrangements and structure alone carrying just as much impact as that of the distorted and disorienting rhythms. Although this album was released through Max Cooper's own record label, there aren't many similarities to his own style of ambient techno here and, for as good as Max's last album was, I honestly don't see it holding up to the magnitude of this album's strengths.
To be honest, I find an album like this difficult to critique. I see no flaws in the production here, and it seems to me like Rob has achieved exactly what he wanted to; an expansive listening experience that unfolds itself in peculiar ways and makes for what I can only describe as a fully functioning concept album, taking you from the start of something (Dirac Sea Birth) right up to its end (Zero Point). I think it's open to interpretation as to what this lifetime concept is, but his intention was to represent the life of our universe. For me personally, I can see how that is intertwined with the music he's made and I think the tone is spot on for something of that scale. This is an album that thrives on thought, and if you give it a go I warn you it's not a passive listen.
9/10
Best Tracks: Casimir; Emerging From; The Vacuum State; A Shiver Sequence; Into; A Flickered;
Worst Tracks: Zero Point
"Hell Mix"
空隙
2nd March 2020
Geometric Lullaby
This is one of those deep dive Bandcamp discoveries I am thrilled to have made, having been immediately drawn to first the cover art, then the tone, and now the music itself.
Opening with what can only be described as the setup to an extraterrestrial themed horror film in a genuinely unsettling phone call with someone rambling in what you interpret as their final moments about population control and the government. It's this early instillation of paranoia and the chilling ambience of the music that sets you up for a record with more twists and turns than a rollercoaster, and it can be about as scary too. The synths loop in and out of focus between the horror movie strings and intermittent vocals for the first two tracks before the almost twelve minute "夢の国" switches things up with a much more confrontational drumbeat that's backed by more typical vaporwave-inspired synths, a remnant of 空隙 [Void]'s time as a partaker in that microgenre.
Void having featured on the renowned Hardvapour collection album a few years ago with the track "Faces" was my only pre-knowledge of this artist's work going into this album, but the direction they take things here on Hell Mix is just as much influenced by ambient, techno and drum'n'bass as it is vaporwave, just another example of an artist further expanding what was once an easy microgenre to pin down and subsequently criticise. I think that for as overlooked and easily forgotten as this album may be, it's yet another example of what makes the genre so diverse. There is such a variety of rhythms to latch onto, there's even one song that primarily features an acoustic guitar. This is great, even the bonus tracks (the latter of which feels somewhat ironic, but I still love it).
Because this album's only on Bandcamp, here's a link: https://geometriclullaby.bandcamp.com/album/hell-mix
8/10
Best Tracks: エイリアン; 夢の国; 한밤중; 월광; Lordship - Archangel; Lordship - Liturgy
Worst Tracks: 오아시스
---
Thank you very much for reading.
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