Extracting emotional content from the regular rhythms of the daylight hours and
finding melody in the introspection of traffic lights, Portland composes eight odes
to the daily grind for his new EP. Crunchy electronic music in the Gridlock-style,
My Daily Routine is a melancholic reflection on the repetitions of life.
There is a time-lapse feel to these tracks as if you were standing on the street
corner, suspended in time like a fly in amber while everything else flashes by at
24x speed. The circadian rhythms of the world are scattered and abrupt, moving more
quickly than your sluggish pulse. While you turn bejeweled melodies slowly in your
hands, the beat patterns compete and decay with chest-tightening alacrity.
“Sleestack” moves like a careful sunrise over a field of restless cattle, the slow
heat of the morning exciting the previously quiescent animals whose sudden and
random movement are a prelude to the thunder of a stampede. “Tactics of” is a
mournful ode to the flickering light at the bottom of the carpark stairwell. As the
slow lament of the light drones out, the bulb dies a shuddering, spasming death.
You have three minutes before darkness swallows you.
The beats of “Fidalgo” wheezes and chirps like Aphex Twin machinery, a rhythm
section of pistons and steam valves as accompaniment for a hesitant contralto on the
jazz stage of the machine underworld. A duet with Dryft, “The Last Ever” slowly
crunches and sizzles around a melancholic etude like a study of the play of light on
the burnished ducts and pipes of the infinite machinery that powers the city’s
infrastructure.
My Daily Routine is an introspective album, a record that fuses slowly evolving
melodies with crunchy beat design. It’s a record that seeks to balance the constant
rush of 21st century information overload with an 18th century reflection on the
pastoral relationship between man and his environment. It’s a record which lets you
sit quietly while your transport races for the sound barrier — a quick quick slow
ride. Very nice.
My Daily Routine is out now on Component Records.
