★★★★☆
Much like last year’s Sommer, DeepChord drifts to an ever-blurring set of compass points. Broadly a chillout album, Rod Modell’s construction of a seemingly inviting hammock is made with bits of barbed wire and can swing in the eye of a storm. He imagines many environments – a life aquatic, the rainbow’s end, Area 51, a higher plain, or simply a space guided by a shapeshifting subtlety.
Tracks smudge into one another in fluid mutation. There is the occasional upsurge of distinction, such as “Whispering Pines” and “Raval” emerging through the clouds like a skyscraper, while “Barcelona” bizarrely enlightens to a backdrop of traffic. But such announcements tend to evaporate into the next scene as Modell values long and short pooled through a slow dub hypodermic. The rippling anonymity of loops creates a spell-caster. But let it get inside your head and the detection of prickles and pressures are cause for insomnia. As it corkscrews in lapsed time, the likes of “Aerosphere” and “De Wallen” tick to buried house tempos. “Lotus Leaves” suddenly leaves you lost and without cellphone coverage, and “Trompettersteeg”‘s alarm clock stimulates your conscience further, rather than getting you to wake up.
Aware again of the album experience, a collective body tossing and turning as one, its magnetic mystery invents its own reality from a five year period prior to 2013. Modell apparently doing very little to effect so much is the IDM oath, where episodes of restlessness uncross a human side.
File under: Echospace, Soultek, Basic Channel