Netherlands-based electronic duo Ralph van Reijendam and Robbert Kok first launched their partnership as Tangent with last year’s debut album ‘1Mk2’ on Mindtrick Records, and scarcely a year on this second album ‘Transience’ seeing them joining the Tympanik Audio label roster, a fitting home for their dark IDM meets ambient industrial sounds. There’s certainly a deeply cinematic feel to this collection, with all twelve tracks here flowing into one another as one continuous 66 minute long set. More than anything, there’s a sense of delicate and occasionally lighter textures being contrasted with noisier and harsher rhythmic elements, to create a sense of grace and beauty that’s often bittersweet. ‘Drifting Frontiers’ opens proceedings with a wash of frigid drones and distant rumbling noise that gradually resolves itself into an almost orchestral swell as clicking insect-like snares infiltrate the mix alongside juddering hiphop rhythms.
If there’s still a trace of a headnod groove to be found deep beneath the gauzy droning layers of textures, ‘Sublimated’ sees more light trickling in as slow synth trails arc and bend against a backdrop of slow, steel-plated drum beats and ominous swelling bass, before the entire track crawls off into a wash of interstellar-sounding drone-ambience that’s easily one of the more eerie moments to be found here. Elsewhere, ‘Discovery’ gets more icily optimistic, sending ripples of digitally treated sounds and fragments of plucked instrumentation murmuring against a lullabye-soft backdrop of delicate ambient synth tones, before ‘Bloom’ sees an almost dubby rolling groove rising up from icy walls of ambient drones, only for contorted signal-processed electronics to threaten to take over the entire mix from the very edges first. There’s a lot to take in here, and a lot of this is pretty heavy-going stuff, but fans of dark ambience given a post-industrial IDM twist along the lines of Totakeke should find plenty to enjoy here.
