I’m a big fan of electronic music.
The ramblings and noodlings of musicians who you would normally find locked in a basement, deprived of sunlight and adequate nutrition are often a labour of love; a painful twisting of the laws of aural physics that quite often descend into a haze of distortion and delay that somehow come together right at the death to form a cohesive song. Aphex Twin and Squarepusher spring to mind here.
Whilst many may shout at the stereo, screaming for a verse or a chorus or something that resembles a structure, electronic music literally can take you on a journey into nothingness; seemingly with no point at all.
And that is the half the pleasure because if you can get into the mind of the composer and believe in the place they resided when they wrote the song you can, I think, truly appreciate the song itself.
So what do we have with Four Tet’s offering ‘Angel Echoes’?
Firstly we get a slow burn start and a few little things going on here and there but nothing too structured; promising so far then.
And then as we begin our journey as the song kicks into life and follows the well trodden, familiar path of electronic music noodling and vocal sampling.
This is a solid track, nothing too adventurous to put of fans off the genre, yet nothing to staid to remind you of anything else that has gone before; it ticks all the boxes in the rule book of electronic music.
Add to that the Caribou mix and you have a winner. For what Caribou does is quicken the pace, bringing his own bombastic approach to the mellowness and add a dash of what is quickly becoming known as ‘Caribouness’ (is that a real word?) to the track; another winner.
The Jon Hopkins remix is steady, adding a further slice in interest to the song and rounding off a solid offering.
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