Mush Records - MH-240 Pedro - Pedro [2006 Edition]

MH-240 Pedro - Pedro [2006 Edition]

Originally released in Europe on Manchester's Melodic Records, Pedro's self-titled full-length debut has garnered universal critical praise, including nods from a number of his production peers. The album is the sound of an artist finding his voice through the distillation of disparate musical forms. Textures of jazz, folk, and rock sit upon a bed of hip-hop infused beats supplemented with samples chopped and layered as musical instruments. The compositions range from simple piano embellished with rhythm generating effects to complex collages filled with live synths swirling over layers of heavy drum programming. The CD version of the album contains the EP, Fear & Resilience (which features remixes by Danger Mouse, Four Tet, Prefuse 73, and others) as a bonus CD.

Tracklist

01. Intro

02. Fear & Resilience

03. Dead Grass

04. These Pixels Weave A Person

05. The Water Ran This Way Back And Forth

06. 123

07. All Things Rendered

08. Seven Eight

09. Outro

Release Details

Release Date: 02/14/2006

Running Time: 38:44

Download/Available/$7.00

1XLP/Out Of Print

2XCD/Available/$10.00

LOSSLESS/Available/$10.00

Territory: World

Reviews Summary

Wonderful stuff - NME / A resplendent sound collage - Remix / A knob-twiddler extrordinaire - Under The Radar / IDM that never loses the listener in its tangents - BPM / A genre-confounding tale of the unexpected from the deftest of techno artisans - Mojo / There will be few better soundtracks to this summer - Stylus

Reviews

944 / Almost Cool / Angry Ape / Barcode / BBC / Boomkat / BPM / CMJ / DJ / Dotshop / Download / Earplug / Gravity Girl / Igloo / Illinois Entertainer / Logo / Loose Record / Mojo / NME / Okayplayer / Properly Chilled / Remix / San Francisco Bay Guardian / Signal to Noise / Slug / Sonomu / Stylus / Tastes Like Chicken / Textura / The Big Picture / The Brainwashed Brain / The Independent / The Maneater / The Pitt News / Tiny Mix Tapes / Treblezine / Uncut / Under the Radar / Urb / X-Ray / XLR8R / XLR8R /

At best, "folktronica" suggests something bleak, forbidding and miserable; at worst, a middle-aged white guy in dreadlocks playing madrigals on Moog synthesizers. James Rutledge, aka Pedro, is way beyond such classifications - following some fairly muted EPs, Rutledge's music has now become anything but generic. Though he does fuse electronica with organic instrumentation - lengthy reverberations of minimal piano are a favorite - there's a lot more going on here than the simple marriage of two genres. Predictably, perhaps, there's a debt to Aphex Twin's early ambient experiments, as well as Pole's blippiness and Susumu Yokota's oriental tech-soundtracks (see 'Seveneight'). However, DJ Shadow-style hip-hop/jazz abstractions are also part of this record's DNA, as is the mantric pop of My Bloody Valentine circa 'Soon'. It's experimental, yes, but the world of Pedro is warm, inclusive and joyful. Schmolktronica. - X-Ray