Santiagø’s music is much more akin to playful grooves than to 70’s sequencers. Minimal, almost bitty lo-fi percussion permeates Holes as granular textures and subtle delay lines assemble these plasmic tunes into shape.
More akin to playful grooves than to 70’s sequencers
On Holes, modular artist Santiagø offers us a collection of raw tunes composed and improvised in the moment during the London lockdown that happened earlier this year. It’s a creative journal, a mood board, an elongated snapshot of this suspended period of our lives. And it’s a genuinely beautiful album.
When dealing with direct recordings of modular tunes, one often encounters long electronic pieces relying on shifting sequences, harmonic minimalism, a sort of oceanic ebb and flow that a lot of eurorack setups seem to lend themselves to. Not so much on Holes. The tracks here never go over the five-minute mark, with three cuts under three minutes, and Santiagø’s music is much more akin to playful grooves than to 70’s sequencers. Minimal, almost bitty lo-fi percussion permeates the album as granular textures and subtle delay lines assemble these plasmic tunes into shape. In “Mellow,” the almost-drunk beat serves as a basis for sweet melodic elaborations, whereas on “Decorate” filtered bursts of noise go off on top of an Eno-esque piano sample.
There is something distinctly British in these perc-driven tunes and in the simple mix, a revival of early 90’s electronica, if not in sound in philosophy, this raw simplicity that Santiagø mentions as a mission statement. There is a palpable DIY approach in this whole project, a way in which the music establishes a direct, live link between us and Santiagø. As said above, genuinely beautiful.
Holes is available on Bandcamp.