| How do you spell happiness? B-E-A-T. I'm a sucker for a tight groove. We're not talking 200bpm dance music, but rather solid downtempo boom baps that activate the spring in the back of your neck - the rhythm of misty rain, heartbeats and good sex. Remembering Today is full of just this type of goodness. Caural employs simple, well programmed beats, but he lovingly tucks them in an intricate quilt of glitchy electronic noise, warbly turntable samples and crisp jazz piano licks. His style of production could be compared to the quieter, more stripped-down aspects of artists such as Four Tet, Prefuse 73 and Boards of Canada, but his work is not derivative. He's able to effectively breathe new life into musical concepts that would normally seem cliché. For example, in "They'll Make a Video Game Out of Killing People Like You," he uses old-school video game sounds to create a section of melody. This has been done time and again, but he's able to pull it off by blending these sounds seamlessly with jazz riffs and ambient fuzz, effectively turning something that could be cold-hearted and synthetic on its head and giving it heart. There are a few purely ambient tracks on this disc as well. "Suicide" goes back and forth between droning, filtered fuzziness and a stark, haunting melody that seems to come from a toy piano. In the vein of Massive Attack's "Mezzanine," this music is simple enough to be sexy and complex enough to linger around long after that sweaty, satisfied cigarette. - Signal to Noise |
1XLP/Out Of Print