Review Summary: dub techno is a mermaid privilege
Techno is a thing of numbing repetition and vast scale, the simplicity of its push-pull rhythms the site of as much churning, shimmering and propulsive lapping as seasoned hands have the patience to glean from it. The same, as many have noticed to their advantage, is true of the ocean. One does not have to look hard to find iconic artists who have drenched their work with nautical inspirations, from the respective dub lacunae and Dagon-esque sci-fi of pioneers Porter Ricks and Drexciya, to Dream Dolphin's aqueous convection of acid and ambience, to the serial maritime output of contemporary mainstay Luigi Tozzi. There is no one oceanic techno sound. Much like outer space in ambient, pastoral imagery in folk, or blighted testosterone mishaps in metalcore, it’s a constant that sustains the genre in too many different guises for any to be entirely definitive – and I’d wager few are more conscious of this than our protagonist of the moment, Charles A.D. (aka Hiroyuki Tanaka).
Japanese farmer by day, electronic voyager of marine expanses whenever time permits, the guy sprung from obscurity to a cult treasure last year thanks to his keynote mini-breakthrough
West Pontoon Bridge and a slew of other LPs that many, including myself, are still taking their time sifting over.
Cyclone foraging sees him extend his prolific streak into the new year, picking up where much of his past output left off and plunging beneath the waves to rescore your favourite ocean documentary with as much dub and untss as you could ask for. In a similar fashion to last year’s
Deep Diver, these tracks emphasise continuity and immersion over the revolving door of tempos and aesthetics many enjoyed so much on
West Pontoon Bridge, yet unlike the former album, its semblance is not so much that of an abyssal descent as much as a buoyant perspective from the interim underwater layers, suggestive of just the right depth to resist the penetration of sunlight but not so far as to escape it entirely.
Although the album’s 72-minute runtime demands more than a little concrete investment of its audience’s imagination, Charles A.D. finds healthy room to develop his aesthetic in this liminal seaspace. Dub techno’s delay effects and sonar-esque
pangs have long evoked a submerged experience, but he adds to these with ripple-like delay patterns (“Cyclone foraging”), through manipulating the frequency spectrum to disorienting effect by creating maximum distance between his high-range synth flutters and lower/mid-range toms as if to mirror the loss of balance and bearing one experiences underwater (“Sea graveyard”), and by blunting the edge of his melodic tones with a phaser in an impression of once-clear sounds heard from the other side of a water surface (“Sun set in the ocean”). The upshot maps its twilight ocean realm over pulsing techno so smoothly that the overall scene transcends the form it’s offered by individual cut: the album is presented with enough refinement that its richest details are rarely ear-catching, but its details will prove nonetheless rewarding to those who tune into it with more effort than is strictly demanded by the gentle pull of its current. If that leaves it more than a little singular in its appeal, then so be it – if he keeps up this level of consistency and rate of output, Charles A.D. will have made an Atlantis of us all by the year’s end.
