A delicate, measured and calm piece, with the producer moving from idea to idea.
Shunt by AL_X (Alex Dunford) is a massive twenty-two track album based on the Liverpudlian’s own dreams and nightmares. Conceptual by nature, this record is full of ambience and sampled sound effects. There are a handful of tunes in amongst the finer details, yet Shunt’s seventy-minutes are intended to tick along as one big track. The result of Dunford moving between an ambient track and a structured one gives an eclectic tone to the record; we’re hearing post-rock, synthesized pads, percussive electronics and massive ambience. It’s a delicate, measured and calm piece, with the producer moving from idea to idea.
Shunt does outstay its welcome—indulgent in sheer length, some of the vignettes and progressions wear thin alongside the conventional tunes—but the record’s variance keeps the ears awake. There’s a handful of numbers you’ll remember, but the majority of the ambient material feels thin and surface. Does the ambient material support Shunt’s more conventional tracks? The answer is unfortunately no. Shunt started out as a four track EP and has evolved into a twenty two track full-length—could Dunford have cut this down considerably? Yes.
This is all to say that Shunt is, for the most part, an achievement; hapless film soundtracks are rarely put together to grip your ears for their entire length, and this sounds like it was made with a motion picture in mind (the transient material has the potential to work well with visual stimulus). It’s also worth noting, with the greatest credit, how the variance of themes live in the same space—and there are seldom many producers around demonstrating this kind of skill.
We tip our hats to AL_X, he’s very talented and Shunt is a fine piece on the whole. Tracks like “Takk (En Sens)” and “Faux” veer into Steven Wilson territory, “Strond” is a sequence not unlike Trent Reznor’s recent OSTs, “Blindness” a kind of Thom Yorke experiment. These comparisons are made with the highest praise. This is impressive stuff.
Shunt is available on Bandcamp.
