Triangles is just an honest to goodness, straight-up electronic record crafted with an ear for layered melody and sparkling effects-work that conjures atmospheres so sublimely heady and uplifting the experience is borderline heavenly.
[Release page] The last few years have seen a prodigious influx of new releases mining synthwave and analogue synthesizer worship, many on new labels and sub-labels, creating a playing field so overcrowded it’s often hard to distinguish the players from the spectators. Digitalis Recordings were among these players but, like many of the imprint’s recent releases, has greater provenance and maturity than most, not to mention an equally prodigious back-catalogue. Label-owner Brad Rose is the man responsible for the Charlatan project through which he releases his sharpest and most vivid material, originally only to be found on a number of limited edition cassettes through various labels and that consequently reached a very select audience. Triangles is the first outing for Charlatan on vinyl (followed later in the year by Equinox released on Aguirre) and once again it sets Digitalis Recordings apart from other purveyors of the genre by presenting some of the most deliriously beautiful music of 2011.
It is for tracks like “Lime Beauty” with its exquisitely crafted, organ-like tones, evocative reverb and extraordinarily vivid acoustic resonance that this album has been described as an almost religious experience. Evoking vast, archaic stone chambers with vaulted ceilings lit by glittering, dust-swirling shafts of sunlight beamed through multi-coloured stained glass windows, the track is given structure by the subtlest Casio keyboard rhythms and knocking bass drums. “Faint Blue Outlines” is another stand-out track, with flickering arpeggio synth tones in bass and treble registers swimming through a cloud of lush, cathedral choir intonations, whilst “Vodka Rocks” bubbles and slurs lazily through the all-pervading, body-vibrating funereal tone-drone of some grand cathedral organ.
Any album that features a track as transcendentally uplifting and life-affirming as “Swimming Pool Summer Nights” deserves a place in any music lovers collection, the swooping flocks of translucent digital birds that twitter and chirp in roiling, cascading flurries above efflorescent pools of churning, glinting gold-flakes, the cool haze of fountain spray and the crisp, bracing bite of the night air as paradisical as music can possibly get. Only “Traces” seems initially somewhat out of place in this collection, the dissonant melodies and mossy textures more reminiscent of Brad’s Altar Eagle material, but the arrival of more intoned vocal pads soon lure the piece back into the spiritual realm.
If only more albums were as refreshingly pure and effortless as Triangles. Neither shamelessly jumping on bandwagons nor aching to be the next big thing, the few synthwave moments that do exist (“Foxes” in particular springs to mind) are never gratuitous. Triangles is just an honest to goodness, straight-up electronic record crafted with an ear for layered melody and sparkling effects-work that conjures atmospheres so sublimely heady and uplifting the experience is borderline heavenly.
For vinyl lovers, the initial limited run on transparent yellow vinyl is worth seeking out as it both visually and sonically divine. One of the true greats from 2011 and no mistake.
Triangles is available on Digitalis. [Release page]
