Following up from Atol Scrap, Arovane comes back with the best release to date this year. This album forms an arc with three tracks featuring a harpsichord marking the opening, intermission, and end of the journey, while the remaining tracks come from the inspiration that gives us the title of the album Tides. These tracks recreate, electronically, sounds that one would come across at the ocean, and reflects an inspiration by said water. The drum patterns and background noises make up the majority of Uwe Zahn’s tidal effect, with staggered, laid back drum sounds, and patterned noise to emulate waves. But do not be mistaken, the tracks all develop and change. There is a lot more to them than just loops of drums sounding like waves.
The album does differ from past Arovane releases in that it is entirely downtempo/ambient. So if you are looking for more dance or experimentalist elements, look elsewhere, but you will be missing out.
As a short anecdote, a girl I recently dated had no real attention span for music. She didn’t think it was possible to just sit and listen to an album without doing anything else. I decided to try and persuade her otherwise, and Tides is the album I selected to do it. It is restful and insightful enough that it should be easily accessible to anyone, which is a plus if you want nice music for a night in. And now I think she is more open to the idea of just listening.
Of note is the appearance of Christian Kleine (whose split 7″ with Arovane on the Awkward Silence label and collaborations with Hermann on CCO and Morr have drawn positive attention of late) playing guitar on four of the tracks.
I would like to compliment the excellent artwork accompanying the disc as well. It features green monotone images of roller coasters (the old wooden style), which are split up with thin blue lines, suggesting an exoskeleton of sorts of the tides/waves. The design is also very simple, which could be thought of as fitting in with the IDM standard of little information. However here it fits in with the theme in being functionally simple and not taking focus off of anything by being glitzy. Again, an excellent release, and a must-own for any music fan.
Tides is available on City Centre Offices.
