Woah! Yeah! Ambient techno, let’s go! Wun too free four! Bzzzzz… zzzz… Music to watch differential equations by, [a]Kit Clayton[/a]’s experiments in abstract dub are nothing if not evocative. What they evoke, sadly, is someone else’s sounds. And though what we’re talking about here, of course, is [a]Pole[/a] – this being the debut release from Stefan Betke‘s new label – what we’re [I]really [/I]talking about here is Primal Scream, Leftfield and, oh yes, Dreadzone.
In his attempts to plug into a sonic tone which brings the spasmodic pulse to the fore while giving space to the vibrant echo effect, Clayton can’t help but emulate his more talented peers who had the same idea about five years ago. ‘Purpakana’ is all ghostly melodica and ‘Echo Dek’ atmospherics, while ‘Nele’ is ‘Storm 3000’ without the sheet-metal breakbeats, ie, boring. ‘Inapiseptili’, meanwhile, is the aural equivalent of Massive Attack‘s ‘Teardrop’ video, with the baby replaced by a broken piano.
Perhaps Clayton’s all-too-successful attempts to recreate the burblings of an empty stomach serve to lull us into a false sense of security before he drops track four, ‘Aspoket’, an otherwise amiable enough cut of minimalist disco-dub which, however, sounds positively floor-filling compared to the sanitised sounds that surround it. More realistically, though, this must actually be the music Clayton hears in his head as he goes about his daily business. On the evidence of ‘Nek Sanalet’, he obviously does a lot of Hoovering.