| The electronic music scene has long been a boy's club, and the women who operate in the synths-and-software underworld usually have to work twice as hard as the lads in order to prove themselves. It's assumed that a girl can't wield a DJM-600 or program beats into Acid with the same gravitas as her Y-chromosomed brethren. Few know this backwards logic as well as Neotropic's Riz Maslen. For almost ten years and three albums, she slugged it out as the sole woman in the Ninja Tune stable, jostling for space between heavyweights Coldcut and Dj Food before splitting for indie hip-hop label Mush. There, she has dropped not only White Rabbits, but the sexist baggage as well. Eschewing the cold, crisp and sterile komputer-musik of her contemporaries, Maslen creates richly-textured soundscapes built on layers of environmental and organic tones. The watery beats, swooning strings, glockenspiel accents and reverb-soaked samples of seagulls, crashing surf and seashells crushed underfoot in the opening tandem of "Girls at the Seaside" and "New Cross" recall a day at of fun in the sun with Air at the top of their laid-back, blissed-out game. These lazy-day pleasures don't last for long, though; the muted interjections of a London tubeway intercom gently shake the fuzzy-headed daydreams away and bring the track back to where it belongs: the big city on a busy day. "Inch Inch" grafts clipped, skittering beats and techno squiggles onto a pleasant live piano melody, then gradually unravels itself into a hushed swirl of treated noises and delicate plinks like a lullaby for baby robots. The middle section of "Magpies" and "Odity Round-a-Heights" is the album's darkest, most unsettling stretch; on the first cut, Maslen steps away from the preceding pieces' more acoustic bent and buries live violin, piano, guitars and drums under a rolling tide of undulating electronic sounds and chopped-up voices. The rich atmospherics swell and subside in progressively stronger waves, building toward a conclusion that always seems seconds away but forever remains tantalizingly out of reach. For the second, she dunks a garbled radio transmission under 20,000 leagues of rippling, ringing ambient noise; it sinks into the cold, silent vacuum of the abyss like a drowning man taking his final breaths before slipping under the waves. From there, though, we're back on (marginally) friendlier turf with "Feeling Remote" and "Joe Luke," both moody electronic pieces that make the glockenspiel, the harmonica and the flute sound threatening. Nice work. Neotropic's warm, earthy-sounding compositions aren't news - technophiles have been trying to replicate natural sounds via technology since synthesizers were first developed - but her approach to computer-based music is refreshing. Maslen isn't afraid to take a spin through her Blackberry and call up a mate to slap some live instrumentation over her beats, and the inspired-by-nature sounds she coaxes out of her equipment sound fresh, robust and full of life. This is the place where glitch and granola meet. Never mind the head-trips: White Rabbits is a nature hike in every key. - Splendid |
2XLP/Out Of Print