These quaint harmonious pieces vanish and reappear, rarely over-saturating the senses, and offer pristine vantage points where ambient, electronic and faded drones intersect without notice.
Matt Robertson joins the Cartesian Binary roster and opens his account with Forecast, an evolving ambient sphere the breathes warm, fuzzy, analogous drones. One can’t help but realize that the softened tones, melodious vistas and tranquil audio retreats echo early works from Boulderdash and Alexandroid—revist We Never Went To Koxut Island (Artelier Music, 2000) and Sinoptic (Art-Tek, 2011), respectively. Though these releases delved into delicate electrical streams, Matt Robertson offers similar sonic perspective. His programming and engineering background can be heard on releases by Lamb and Stateless and his contributions as arranger and musical director for Bjork can’t be ignored either. How does Forecast estimate its musical climate?
“Beet” tends to emerge with more direct low-end rumbling as “Not Joining” coalesces via percussive bubbles and submerged flutes not unlike what Boards Of Canada recently unleashed on Tomorrow’s Harvest (Warp, 2013) after almost a decade of anticipation. While “Not Joining” emits a brief three minute calm, the album ebbs and flows in solemn passages through space. “Additional” contains a distant soundtrack build-up which pulls like gravity and the Plone’styled pinging on “Little Speaker” is quite simply minimized nostalgic sweetness. These quaint harmonious pieces vanish and reappear, rarely over-saturating the senses, and offer pristine vantage points where ambient, electronic and faded drones intersect without notice.
Forecast is available on Cartesian Binary. [Release page]
