BETA TWO AGONIST
Autumn Perdue
DB08021
Databloem Records 2008
08 Tracks. 52mins53secs

Autumn Perdue has a well-defined identity, yet the music is continuously allusive, evoking diverse compositional styles and traditions.  The album comprises a series of interconnected miniatures, sprung from an over-arching tension between the mellifluous and the abstract, the judiciously hesitant and the prudent.  Kamunyak bears out these family resemblances, its careworn fuzziness being overlaid with static, a clip-clop beat, and some random noise, as if a satellite signal had begun to drift away.

It’s all arranged in a manner that is adventurously loose and full of rich, slow-burning incidents that heat up and flicker away in an exquisitely subdued manner. Adding various wrinkles to the proceedings, the romantic deploying of strings and piano act both as elaborate bridges between themes and as the main fulcrum, thus furthering and making more pronounced the sonic, dynamic and emotional range of the album.  Lacrimae Dream, for instance, shows delicacy and passion in the advancement from shortlived piano passages and looped electronic bric-a-brac to burgeoning swelling strings that glisten with the tension of waiting.

After these more laterally inclined pieces, peopled with brittle digital chips that glow and wheel like fireflies in the night sky, more ambient works weigh anchor and settle in underneath a sky sparsely constellated by beautiful synth tones.  These pieces possess a shimmering momentum and an innate contemplative streak that runs through them like an undertow.  Autumn Perdue is one of the finer experimental electronica albums released this year, deserving the closest attention and the highest praise.

4.3/5

Beta Two Agonist | Databloem Records
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