Playlouder - Music is the Network

Accompany me, if you will, on a trip to the ocean floor. 3 meters down, sunlight glints through the shifting currents. A million organisms are in constant motion, carrying out their assigned biological processes. Its hard not to smile at the beauty of what seems to be some kind of inherent order playing itself out within the disconnected movements of the myriad creatures inhabiting this undersea milieu, to feel the mood of the place fluctuate like the tides, cast into a sinister gloom by clouds passing overhead, and then benign again as a colourful shoal whirls into view. 

But of course this is no seabed, this a disc called Inlandish, and the patterns we are drawing between the dots are not the tell-tale fingerprints of some cosmic ordering principle nor solely a product of man’s inbuilt capacity for pattern-finding, but rather the excellently other-worldly result of the collaboration between Hans-Joachim Roedelius, formerly of 70s German electronic wizards Cluster but for this performance manning the piano, and American neo-classical bod and “synth-assisted explorer” Tim Story. 

Roedelius’ minimalist repeating piano figures act as the sea, natural, hypnotizing, ever-present, the medium in which Story’s synthesised experiments can go about their business, burbling and floating against and with and between the currents. Though always melodic and often emotionally affecting it never slips into sentimentality, ambient mush or chill out bland. A threat in the distance that never quite materialises is ever present, reminding of the fragile nature of life, that beauty is temporary, there and then gone, a product of our human perceptions, lost in the constant flow of time. 

It might take a few listens but it pretty much all makes perfect sense, an involving and expansive meeting of minds that takes in hints of bands like Rachels (minus the chamber post-rock), Boards of Canada (minus the chewy beats. Or indeed any beats, pretty much), and Air (minus the willful perversion), and yet remains very much its own beast, shifting and ambiguous and yet so very enticing. Like the sea, innit.