(06.17.07) Seattle-ite Chris Jones’s debut Yard full-length is a solid collection of leftfield minimal techno with electro and ambient trimmings. It follows on an earlier digital-only 4-tracker, Northern Cedar, giving a foretaste of what Yard was about. What he’s about is not immediately apparent, since the set opens with the brief prologue of slightly edgy whirr-shimmer that is “Cascade.” Soon enough, though, we’re besieged by the beats of “Bees,” a fab slab of minimal, not banging, but slow burning acid-trance meltdown manners, hosting swarming synth-clouds with a silver Detroit lining. “Canopy” follows, already familiar from Northern Cedar, with more dubbed out stalking motions and peculiar brass-like drones sliding over a skittery substratum that builds into a shuffling counter-rhythm, then phase-shifts
against an increasingly intense hardcore floor-kick for a strange and beguiling piece of subtle noir-tech. “White Fog” changes strategies for a spidery electro-dub-funk workout that again plays around with listener expectations through its setting up of counter-rhythms. The centrepiece comes with the thrum-throb thrill of the pummeling “Portabello,” its amphetamine rush and analogue mist coming on like turbo-injected sub-bass-fuelled Suicide for the ’00s – a harder core more minimal take on the Nathan Fake hybrid where IDM texturology is subsumed under a techno bpm regime. “Pacquet,” another Northern Cedar sapling, opens into icy bleep-techno allied to sequenced acid trance menace with a stern 4-on-the-floor insistence, and a metallic intensity cranked up to Porter Ricks proportions. “Synthetic Waves” offers a kind of moody intermission as sine-tones loop out and found sounds swoosh at the perimeters. “Under the Bonnet” is the first track that bears the tell-tale off-beat jack of house – that shimmy-shift that throws the beat off the four-square, but, truth be told, Jones does way too little with its skeletal form, and skimpy fleshtones are sketched in far too late to be of consequence. Interestingly, he chooses to close with a more ambient piece that could almost be a looplet of Eno bell-tone chiming chord-drift, were it not for the – so unkicking as to be almost gestural – kickdrum anchoring it to something called “techno,” and intrusive glitches of skittering percussively-primed static.
At barely over 40 minutes, Deciduous Flood Plains certainly couldn’t be said to have overstayed its welcome. It could, however, be accused of not leaving the best memory of itself with these two closing tracks, the greatest resonance coming from the five-track sequence running from 2 through 6. Yard’s music is at its best when it gets the tensions between gritty technoid thump, electro bleep, and drone-bience right, which it does for about two-thirds of this collection. Not bad going for starters, Mr Jones.
Deciduous Flood Plains is out now on Concrete Plastic.
