Distant transit samples give way to an ambience you’ve heard before, but also never heard. Pushkin has taken the deceptively-simple constructs of ambient electronica and pieced them together for an incredibly nostalgic feel.
I recently had the immense pleasure of listening to the second release on Touched Electronix TE002 and amongst it was an incredibly well-placed track that I kept coming back to time and time again. “Zola” provided rich noise and a rising happiness that lifted my day, allowing me to truly escape from what was happening around me and forget, even if it was just for a few minutes. Luckily for me the artist responsible—Pushkin—has showcased another bunch of his talent on Touched Music and I couldn’t be more pleased.
I almost don’t realize the album is playing, the introduction is slow, its exact beginning hard to pinpoint but once it’s there it’s unmistakably there. Distant transit samples give way to an ambience you’ve heard before, but also never heard. Pushkin has taken the deceptively-simple constructs of ambient electronica and pieced them together for an incredibly nostalgic feel.
Tracks one to five feel like a mix tape, the kind you’d make for someone whose attention you were trying to get. If you’re not listening to this on physical media then you’d better be sure to get hold of a media player that can handle gapless-playback—it’s a delight to listen to a release as seamless as this. Even within tracks it auditions like different songs, stems intertwined here and there and by the time “Lounge” hits, I know this would be enough to keep any dance floor in motion. “Alien Highway” feels very 90s and I can’t help but think of “Higher State Of Consciousness” (Josh Wink) throughout its first half, but without the silly trance-craze that left the aforementioned-track occasionally unbearable. This is stripped back, laid bare & exactly what you need to twist and groove. Yet again we are treated to passages and phrases with “The Sun Came Out” that feel so incredibly familiar that this is just like putting on a CD that I listened to a hundred times as a teenager but forgotten about, much to my detriment. And then comes “Zola” again. Even appearing so recently on TE002 the track stands out, listening to it in this sequence shows it in a completely different light and it’s almost as if the whole release has been building up to these seven minutes.
The second half of the album changes gear so quickly that it’s almost hard to remember what I was just listening to, it’s crazy-good that I’m being pushed forward like this. You reach a point of no return and there’s no option but to continue. Each of the last-five tracks hold their own, there’s some bleed between them but they are very much their own pieces in contrast to the beginning of this experience. Tempos slow yet fast, lush pads and pensive transitions really reinforce the early-feel of this collection. “Numbers” really gets to me, it’s haunting and just makes me want to close my eyes, reminiscent of Abigail Mead’s epic work on the Full Metal Jacket soundtrack. Something about it unnerves me but I can’t stop listening. The shift to the final track “Departed” is fluid and subtle, a welcome nod to the first five.
Overall I’ve had a lot of fun with this release. Hats off to Pushkin—he’s really solidified some great techniques and presented something truly beautiful, worthy of a place in anybody’s collection if they really care about electronic music.
Sertra Line is available on Touched Music.
