Last year’s debut album from Recondite, On Acid, was a melancholy 303 jam which felt like it was recorded for early on a lonely Sunday morning. On Acid sat perfectly alongside a series of releases by Tin Man who had been mining a deep vein of sad, greyscale acid tracks for the past few years. Recondite’s series of EPs for his own Plangent label continued this late night melancholy.
Here’s on Hinterland, though, the beats that kept things moving forward are there but are much less present. Instead field recordings and impressionistic washes and melodies provide the basis of most of the tracks – apparently inspired by Recondite’s time and travels in Lower Bavaria. Its all very pleasant but rather nondescript and, on speakers, falls far too easily into the background much like a lot of the ambient techno of the 90s. This is redeemed on good headphones where the spatial detail of the production is able to be heard but overall there’s too many other records like this already in circulation. Riant and Abscondence could almost be a discards from Warp’s seminal Artifical Intelligence series with their twinkling melodies, while Floe recalls Biosphere’s early 2000s deep ambience.
Seb Chan
