An odd little release, this collaboration between Tim Koch and Adrien75 bellies up to the water’s surface with a bright, smeary mix of trip-hop, IDM, and electro-funk.
A wonky, enjoyable 30 minutes of collaborative music-making
An odd little release, this collaboration between Tim Koch and Adrien75 bellies up to the water’s surface with a bright, smeary mix of trip-hop, IDM, and electro-funk.
The release is endearingly tagged with the “dolphinwave” genre, which, if it wasn’t a real thing before, it is now. Presumably titled after the (misleading) stories that the COVID-19 pandemic caused such a reduction in boating traffic that the indigenous dolphins who swam in the canals of Venice were able to return to their ancestral grounds, this release evokes the idea of things we wish were true but actually aren’t.
I won’t try to replicate the unicode characters which make up the song titles, but Koch and Adrien put together six short tracks for this release, opening up with the joyous “Frinkpost”, wordless vocals echoing over a grooving dub bassline. “Beer Pupil” starts right off with a clattering funky drum groove that hearkens back to Koch’s early 2000’s IDM workouts. I would drop this in to lighten the mood during a techno set at a club, if there ever are such things as clubs again in the future.
Next up is “Bios Meekly” which slows things down and was probably my main inspiration for the “smeary” adjective above – processed sounds pan around the stereo field with an underwater vibe, never quite resolving into voices or tones. “Ft Rogman (Remix)” by contrast starts with a layered ambient drone that feels like a short snippet of a much longer piece and suddenly snaps into sharp focus with free-jazz drums and detuned piano.
The EP closes out with the duo of “Hob Six”, a mutant organ loop over heavily filtered percussion, and finally “Dark Ivor” which brings and unexpected R&B vocal over layers of washed out trip-hop. It somehow always seems to be slowing down, but never actually changes speed.
“Nature is returning”, the meme goes, accompanying pictures of fauna returning to their habitats in the sudden, COVID-induced absence of modern industrialization. In the case of Dolphins of Venice, the isolation of IDM musicians has forced a reversion to the mean: a wonky, enjoyable 30 minutes of collaborative music-making.
INSECT SPREAD is available on Bandcamp. [Release page]
