(February 2009) Toni Polkowski and Danny Prusseit, the minds behind IDM project Atmogat have redefined their space within the ambient music community, with their powerful new release, Trigger Event for Greece-based Impulsive Art. This album serves as a sort of anthem to the grimy, digitized urban spaces of the near-future. Distinctly dystopian sci-fi, this album speaks to a prospective world of men as machines looking nostalgically back at our present.
Each track featured on Trigger Event contrasts deeply industrial soundscapes, with synth lines and quiet melodies that allude to a softer emotional quality in music’s recent past. The album begins with the highly structural “Battery’s Low,” calling to mind the isolation and exhilaration experienced by the humans left in a overly-mechanized urban environment. Trigger Event exists in the perfect space between music clever and minimalistic enough to exist in the back of one’s mind and complex enough, both structurally and emotively for the listener to pour over intently. The broken beat drumlines sway between rhythms of fractured machines to danceable beats. “Melophase” begins with airy dreamy synths and succinctly sinks into moments of allusions to glitchy techno and deep house. “Shani” recalls the textural quality of tape loops, as the track rewinds sounds back and forth. The dark tone of this album is complicated. Trigger Event doesn’t deliver fatalism, but more of an exploration of mechanization and urban spaces. “All the Hope” contrasts other tracks on the release with a tone of longing and hopeful ascending synth lines.
Overall this album crafts a unique vision of German metropolis and international digital culture, showcasing Polkowski and Prusseit’s unique and intricate abilities as producers.
Trigger Event is out now on Impulsive Art. [Listen / Purchase]
