Vancouver-based electronic producer Stephen Hummel’s preceding 2007 album as SubtractiveLAD ‘No Man’s Land’ showed his music moving even further away from the glitchy IDM-electronic leanings of earlier albums such as ‘Giving Up The Ghost’ and ‘Suture’, towards a more organic, emotionally candid and free-flowing post-rock / shoegaze aesthetic informed perhaps by his background in the jazz-improv. world. As hinted at by last year’s download-only ‘Decay As A Lifestyle’ EP, this fourth SubtractiveLAD album ‘Apparatus’ sees this stylistic shift deepening even further, resulting in a collection that easily contains Hummel’s most mature-sounding and emotionally provocative material to date. Opening track ‘Civil Dusk’ certainly provides a suitably evocative introduction to this expansive 10 track, 62 minute long collection, with an almost disorienting sweep of droning harmonic tones generating a potent atmosphere that feels touched by traces of the Middle East, shortly before hissing textures that suggest a sudden rush of air take things out amidst what sounds like ghostly traces of detuned bowed instrumentation and howling amp feedback. From there, the languid ‘Between Us’ casts a slight nod towards early Eno as liquid sounding analogue synth pads slowly build into a wash of swoops and buzzes, the planktonic burble of distant synth sequences nicely capped off by the addition of reverbed-out live drums, just before the subtle guitar elements that first reared their heads on ‘No Man’s Land’ emerge into full shimmering detail, taking things off on a stirring post-rock trajectory that recalls one of Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s more wide-eyed moments.
By contrast, ‘Decay As A Lifestyle’ sees those same rock elements bleeding straight into the foreground, as crashing reverb-heavy cymbals power their way beneath a psychedelic wash of slow synth arpeggios and majestic-sounding guitar bends that nods as much to seventies psyche/prog as much as it does to the likes of the Thrill Jockey and Kranky labels, while the melancholic ‘Spoiled Honey’ initially suggests a return to the colder, electronics-dominated explorations of Hummel’s earlier work, only for the icily brooding synth pads to slowly peel away as vast, DSP-manipulated live drums, atmospheric drones and serrated guitar feedback take up centre space. ‘Apparatus’ is easily Hummel’s most impressive and emotionally candid sounding album as SubtractiveLAD to date, and a record truly deserving of n5MD’s self-described tag ‘emotional experimental electronica.’
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