Recycle or Die
TRUE (Tuesday Round-up of Everything), Week of 6/17, Post 6:
Way back in the early days of the first wave of the new ambient, a little German label called Recycle or Die surfaced in Berlin, put out maybe 10 exquisite CDs of bubbling, winking, transportive electronica, and vanished. This was their first release, and it has recently found its way back into my writing mornings and my reading evenings. With a lot of new-electronica, I kinda think that the stuff people claim to love most is the stuff they heard first, because passionate subculture arguments notwithstanding, a lot of it's kinda interchangeable, even the stuff that doesn't wag its tail (or big bassy butt) too hard in its desire to be loved. And yeah, I heard ROD stuff pretty early. But it all stands up amazingly well. The ingredients are familiar: spiraling sequencers, textures that tumble and blink and burble, long, hazy nebulae that cohere into dense-packed, ice-cored spacedust. But even with ambient techno, it turns out, it's the programmer, not the program. Don't believe me? Let this one swirl around and seep into you all the way to the nine minute mark or so, when that piano wanders through, shoulders the whole, spectral thing on its back...and then launches...
Way back in the early days of the first wave of the new ambient, a little German label called Recycle or Die surfaced in Berlin, put out maybe 10 exquisite CDs of bubbling, winking, transportive electronica, and vanished. This was their first release, and it has recently found its way back into my writing mornings and my reading evenings. With a lot of new-electronica, I kinda think that the stuff people claim to love most is the stuff they heard first, because passionate subculture arguments notwithstanding, a lot of it's kinda interchangeable, even the stuff that doesn't wag its tail (or big bassy butt) too hard in its desire to be loved. And yeah, I heard ROD stuff pretty early. But it all stands up amazingly well. The ingredients are familiar: spiraling sequencers, textures that tumble and blink and burble, long, hazy nebulae that cohere into dense-packed, ice-cored spacedust. But even with ambient techno, it turns out, it's the programmer, not the program. Don't believe me? Let this one swirl around and seep into you all the way to the nine minute mark or so, when that piano wanders through, shoulders the whole, spectral thing on its back...and then launches...
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