Re:sonate – FAX

Gaudi we should all know: fantabulous Interchill debut Bass, Sweat & Tears followed rather quickly by the impressive-but-patchy Continuum. Pete Namlook is a German ambient-merchant, and a prolific one at that, with over 200 albums and collaborations released in the 1990’s. What we’ve got here is a set of three tracks that clichéd reviews such as myself are supposed to call “epic” – weighing in at seventeen, twenty-two and fifteen minutes, they’re ideal fuel for the chillout DJ badly in need of a piss. The 7th Spirit sees the two boys’ styles in roughly equal measures: you’ve got a deep, rolling, swaying dub bassline whose pattern-rigidity contrasts nicely with the ever-changing, glassy topend. It drifts through playful glitch, wide-angle panning, universe-unfolding, all while this gorgeously simple bassline keeps it all in check. As you might expect from a seventeen-minute track, it’s in no hurry to go anywhere. Which is nice: if you want to stick it on in the background and shag, it’s perfectly happy as wallpaper. If, however, you prefer to listen-in to it then there’s enough shifting substance going on to offer you something quite rewarding. Nafk sounds to my ear more like 75% Namlook, 25% Gaudi. A very desolate intro points to the ambient music history of Pete’s native Germany, and there’s but a suggestion of Gaudi’s styles on this one: it’s an undercurrent of reverb-drenched tabla. And, oddly, it doesn’t feel like you’re listening to a 22-minute workout – it’s surprisingly cohesive, doesn’t alienate (which, let’s face it, a lot of proper ambient music f*ing well does). Finally The Sun Won’t Set sounds more like Gaudi was at the wheel, while Namlook did the navigating from the Atlas, occasionally rolling spliffs. You’ve got dense electro-dub at the back, you’ve got otherworldly perfect tweakage at the top, and dazzlingly in-love melodies… and you’ve got over a quarter of an hour of them. The Sun Won’t Set is, for my money, the real masterpiece here: if there was a whole nother CD in this vein then we’d be very very happy bunnies indeed. An interesting project again from Gaudi, though it doesn’t feel like you’re listening to such a cornerstone ‘event’ as you did with Bass Sweat & Tears. Still, he’s on his way to being the leading chillout artist at the moment, and we’re having fun accompanying him there.