Vancouver-based electronic producer Stephen Hummel’s preceding album under his SubtractiveLAD alias ‘Wilderness’ saw him moving away from the digital-heavy production that characterised his earlier work, in favour of a more analogue synth oriented approach. Two years on, this tenth SubtractiveLAD album ‘Nucleus’ sees that trajectory continuing. Originating from live jams in Hummel’s home studio, the fourteen tracks here see him working almost completely with hardware instruments and effects, including an MPC and several analogue synths. The result of this shift in production methods is certainly evident, indeed there’s a distinctly warmer and more visceral edge to much of this album, which leans for the most part towards dark and brooding post-IDM atmospheres.
Opening track ‘From Seed’ gives good indication as to the stormy skies that lay ahead as slowly rippling arpeggios rise up against a backdrop of melancholic analogue synth pads, the sense of cold grandeur being evoked providing the perfect curtain raiser to this collection. ‘Extinguished’ meanwhile manages to wind the tension levels even tighter, sending contorted breakbeats skipping out against urgent minor key synth sequences, the metallic rhythms corkscrewing and bending against waspy pitch-bent synths and 303 burbles, in what’s easily one of the more flexing moments on offer here.
Elsewhere, ‘Finger Painter’ lives up to its playful title, offering a lighter counterpoint to the darker material here as bright analogue synth melodies dance against a backdrop of loosely fluttering rhythms, though it isn’t long before ominous bass synths threaten to drag things off into more menacing waters, the twinkling melodies frantically dragging the entire track back out of the churning darkness that lies beneath. In many senses it’s emblematic of Hummel’s overall approach here, that of balancing more melodic and delicate elements with a darker undercurrent, without allowing either of these sides to subsume the other and detract from the sense of emotional pull.
