Album review: Variant / ‘The Setting Sun’ (Echospace)
Nov 9th, 2009 | By admin | Category: Music Reviews
Working under the Variant moniker, Steve Hitchell creates washes of ambient textures. The result is an album that makes a major statement for dub-techno.
The Echospace imprint may have built their reputation on the back of DeepChord’s debt to Basic Channel’s mutant dub techno reductionism, but the label has slowly managed to grow into its own. Starting with the release of Brock Van Wey’s White Clouds Drift On And On—an excellent collection of billowing ambient compositions very much worthy of the album’s title—earlier this summer, the label’s more recent wares have found them operating in a sea of ambient textures virtually devoid of the resonant dub chords and locked-in 4/4 rhythms of their previous output. The latest Echospace full-length, Variant’s The Setting Sun, continues this drive into more abstract territory, with each track coming off as a languorous pool of sonic matter, a resonant frequency seemingly devoid of both attack and decay; it simply just…is. What we’re left with is a lush, ambient record that stands among Echospace’s most mature releases to date and signals a bold aesthetic shift for the somewhat stagnant dub-techno scene.
Carl Ritger
File under: Basic Channel, Vladislav Delay, Tim Hecker
