Guiding us through the wee hours, the four tracks all sit firmly within the dub techno fields of introspective muted kicks alongside reverb and delay heavy synth stabs.
You can’t beat a bit of deeply ambient dub techno, especially on a Sunday. Finnish producer Juho Hietala (aka Blamstrain) serves up exactly that on this very tasty excursion into the furthest reaches of dub minimalism. Even if you don’t play it on a Sunday…you’ll think it’s a Sunday anyway.
Written in one sitting within a restricted sound palette, the aim of the four tracks is to ‘tell the story of one evening in the Netherlands’ (since he’d just moved there from Finland) with a focus on music for ‘moments of shifting focus’ such as traveling on a train or meditating. And it certainly works.
Pitched against a back drop of subdued field recording hiss, Hietala places downtempo kicks and pitch bent bass lollop against gentle delay pattern synths and other finely processed minutiae of sound. Managing to keep things the right side of slow motion funky without descending into a syrup of blunted tedium is tough within this style of music yet it’s pulled off here with aplomb. There’s plenty of tension, other-worldly skittering atmospherics and creeping melodies to carry each track and provide thought provoking musical accompaniment to any late night contemplation.
Guiding us through the wee hours, the four tracks all sit firmly within the dub techno fields of introspective muted kicks alongside reverb and delay heavy synth stabs. By the time we get to 1am, we’re properly in the zone as billows of processed melodies scatter across a low slung bass refrain. By 4am I’m with Hietala as he explores Dutch woods late at night and by the closing 6am I’m contemplating staying in the woods forever—it seems rather nice in there.
Chilled melodic ambient dub of the highest order—one for all you dreamers out there and available to buy at store.blamstra.in.
Sunday Dub is available on Erotus.
