Review Summary: Your destination can wait
The association between familiar places and the relevant memories is pretty obvious, but there’s something special when that same sensation of positional remembrance is maintained when either of those two elements is entirely new. Basically, it’s cool when a brand new place makes you relive moments as though they occurred there, or if a setting you’re acquainted with is able to feed your imagination with all sorts of crazy recollective tangents. This is a bit of a longwinded explanation to explain the appeal of José Delgado (aka Boliden)'s brand of ambient techno, with its foggy texture well suited for the cassette tape format.
Landscape and Memory is titled a bit straightforwardly, as it presents those items for fodder, but doesn’t insist upon either of them any further. Exploratory techno music is, by its nature, ambiguous; when a producer is able to incorporate stirring ambience with engaging rhythms and evocative snippets of noise, that place-versus-memories state of consciousness has room to solidify, dissolve, and repeat the cycle.
If Boliden’s music lacked its variation of beats, and was essentially just decent ambient music, then there would be a slightly more monotonous feeling of immersion. His discerning techno handling grants the music a weird sort of recurring head-dunking effect: you go from submersed in fluid nostalgia to removing yourself, placed at an angle where you simply enjoy the rhythms, effects, melodies, and so on. It’s unfocused in the best possible sense. Singling out moments can be difficult in what is a very smooth, self-levelling album; after repeated listens,
Landscape and Memory seems to blanket itself over and over, so the highlights share the same warm and comfort of any lesser tracks. It keeps up a wistful, floating momentum throughout. “Lahar” and “Tailings” are possibly the most energetic, whereas “Interstitial” and closer “7 AM” are comparably relaxed; and, while there are plenty of subtle sonic variations throughout - vocal melodies, various noise snippets, and layers of noises both dense and cloudy - it all contributes to an ebbing and flowing hypnotic sensation.
That’s not to say there aren’t distinct emotions conveyed track to track, aside from all that. Opener “Pools” dawdles through minimal rises and falls, tech house patterns, and hollowed-out throbs. Elsewhere, “Obliteration” features dubious, yet almost missable tempo shifts, and a consistent inhale-exhale effect that ends with a hover, repeating beautifully forevermore. “Tailings” replicates the feeling of following with a semi-absent mind, as the rhythm grants it linear focus amidst a soundscape that easily distracts. Really, that’s the essence of
Landscape and Memory summed. In his own (or perhaps Oxtail Recording’s) words, the album mimics a “
train ride through the Piedmont: the horizon buckles sideways as your mind wanders in and out.” It’s taking a new environment and, in conjunction with enjoying its natural beauty, striving to dilate time just enough to cram a thousand memories into it.
