While UK electronic producer David Dando-Moore’s most recent preceding 2005 album Origin showed him venturing towards more downbeat ambient/IDM influences, this latest third album through Ad Noiseam Fractured is a considerably different sort of beast, indeed. In many senses, 2006′ Thresholds single provided something of a hint as to where Dando-Moore’ music was headed next, and Fractured certainly shows him making something of a return to the grittier and more aggressive textured explored on his debut album Endogenous, with guitars and frenetic breakbeats increasingly present amidst the eleven tracks collected here. If ominous hip-hop fuelled opener “Desolate (5-HTP mix) calls to mind UNKLE and The Bug getting down and dirty in a Prague cellar as swooping cinematic strings float between Persian-sounding female vocals, cavernous drums and brooding bass drops, shortly before things descend into a chaotic scramble of accelerated junglist breakbeats, “Collide’ comes across closer to Rammstein gone Middle Eastern-dnb, as hammering broken rhythms smash their way across eerie exotic minor-key instrumentation and thick, sludgy metallic guitar riffage.
While the above combination might sound lunk-headed on paper, in practice it’s Dando-Moore’s astute deployment of moodily cinematic arrangements that lifts the contents of Fractured well above the usual tortured goth-industrial cliches, as well as his incorporation of lesser used influences drawn from both film soundtracks and classical music. The latter certainly betrays itself as an influence amidst “Detrimental’ lush, downbeat fusion of elegant piano keys, emotive string arrangements and stripped-back hip-hop beats, one of several moments here that shows Dando-Moore staking out the same sort of brooding terrain captured by Massive Attack on their Mezzanine album – though, just as you’re getting used to the comparative calm, a fusillage of junglist rhythms arrive, suddenly accelerating things forward like a freight train. Gorgeously delicate highlight “Lethe’ follows this downbeat trajectory to even deeper, lusher levels, with slow, lazy drums cutting a dreamlike path beneath glacial piano keys and a dizzying ambient wash of sampled children at play in a fusion that manages to stay on the right side of Zero 7 and AIM, while the two additional remixes by labelmates DJ Hidden and Keef Baker manage to spice proceedings up with digressions into contorted jazz drill and bass and clattering breaks, respectively.
Chris Downton
