As the muted rhythms and delicate sequencing of 'Sketch' come shimmering into focus, its clear that Parisian Julien Neto has a sure grasp of form and dynamics. True, the crackles, purrs, hisses and whistles of a sampler can be salvaged by anyone, but to craft music out of them requires musicianship, something Neto has in profusion. A brief opening composition sets the pace and outlines the agenda. Neto employs a compositional process that flourishes from embroidering ever more elaborate threads of melody around a repeating core or loop. A benignly hypnotic piano lends the form spectral hues, its tones climbing and tumbling melodic ladders, sometimes nodding to Sylvain Chauveau and Max Richter along the way, above a thick weave of strings, galloping clicks and short-wave encryptions. Although imbued with the elegiac lyricism of Chauveau, Neto retains a distinguished mark in the lapping tides of digital interference which pound and otherwise polish the surface of his howling string arrangements, making them as smooth as stones found along the shoreline. His minimal, often melancholy, arrangements revolve in wafer-light patterns, sprouting lifelike branches and thorns as they trample through clouds of distortion and fuzz. The efforts only flaw is its penchant for faintly overcooking the brew. More often than not, the multi-tracking and studio smearing is so dense as to border on the syrupy. Still, these are vivid portraits of frozen lagoons, where, hands cracked with cold, one can smell the midnight oil and see the long necks of streetlamps, flecked by snow.
Max Schaefer
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