(01.04.06) I hesitate to use the word “wordly” when referencing Bluetech’s second
album, Sines and Singularities, but in light of the extensive
touring done following his first release on Aleph Zero, Bluetech’s
sound has become richer and more, well, “worldly.” Not world-beat ala
Juno Reactor, but simply more assured and more textured, filled with a
subtle confidence that makes the tracks both more robust and more
phantasmal.
The percussion of “Enter The Lovely” is a triplicate of artesian
effluvium, bubbling rhythms that weave around each other.
Synthesizers cum spirit voices are a wordless siren call which summons
strange yearnings in the listener. “Enter The Lovely” is a high
desert exultation for the dawn, a thermal of voices and rhythms that
rises up from the cold sand to greet the warm sun. “Leaving Winter
Behind” rises like steam around a very simple piano melody (one note
left to echo into infinity before the next descending note is struck),
evoking images of naked trees bearing witness to a winter ceremony
where George Winston is lowered into the white-cold lake with his
Steinway. The trees sway back and forth as arctic winds blow snow
across the water and freeze over the lake and the submerged pianist.
Bluetech’s work would have been relegated to the Chill Room in the
’90s, but with the emergence of global groupthink in the 21st century,
the chill vibe has been allowed into the front room where tracks like
“Airstream” are allowed to play out across the active cortex of the
brain. Verging on downtempo (as in “introspective downtempo” or
“vibrant chill” — it’s that cross-pollination of genres that happens
once both firmly entrenched in the collective consciousness),
“Airstream” darts and swirls with dappled melodies and the
micro-patter of dusty percussion, an electronic wind which caresses
your face while blowing the sand of ancient civilizations across your
toes. “Shimmer” wavers like a heat mirage, an undulating series of
glistening tones and shards of stringed melody that shiver and twine
around each other in a slow-motion blender of cool sound.
“Wilderness” is haunted by the sound of frogs, the grotty distorted
voices of the amphibians singing beneath a downtempo evocation of warm
swamp weather. Bluetech adds layers of synthesizers, as if we were
slowly drifting further and further into a fetid realm of mist and
streaming mosses where the air is rich with the scent of mysterious
flowers.
There’s a straight line between Jean-Michel Jarre and Evan Bluetech,
but while Jarre wanted to fill stadiums and take over the world with a
synthesizer, Bluetech knows the synthesizer has already conquered the
world via the warehouse raves and the small club beat-boxing. He’s
just interested in changing the wave patterns in your brain —
altering your internal chemistry by doping you with his vibrations.
Sines and Singularities is the wave pattern of ambient alchemy,
the vibratory sigil which transforms rigid stone and unyielding metal
into placid liquid and quiescent gases. We are all just puddles of
warm goo after the passage of Bluetech.
Sines and Singularities is out now on Aleph Zero.
