Review Summary: Breakbeat golden boy works fresh magic, children everywhere weep joyously
Whether or not by design, the title of Andrea's latest full-length (
Living Room) is a perfect metaphor for one of the most valuable, reliable functions music consumption can offer a pal. Not 'living room' as in your lounge or whatever your pocket of the Anglosphere has you calling your sitting-drawing-living couch potatoing chamber (though with a bit of luck it may also be that), but rather any space that you experience with the patience, presence and environmental sensitivity for it to become seemingly 'alive'. You'll have heard Satie and Eno's conception of 'furniture music' (often unfavourably refigured as 'wallpaper music') or John Cage's emphasis on stasis and and (yes) silence, but it's just as easy to see ambient music as something more animate, something patiently transformative that does away with self-centred subject/object relations and encourages a Zen-like interconnection between you as a beholder and the phenomena around you as beheld. In the 'living room' experience, not only is the 'room' alive, but you are everywhere — whether by diffusing your mood and mindset across the canvas of the music and projecting them over everything in sight, by going the Zen route and taking it as a prompt to recognise yourself in your surroundings, or by drawing on some animist belief in the inherent spirit of all thing. Attuning yourself to your environment is good, and it is never a stretch to make music part of that process.
Needless to say, this is a total gamechanger for anyone who lays off their instant gratification or (more often than not the case for this hapless website) angsty supplements to prescription meds long enough to pick up a new mode of listening — it opens up a whole new set of appeals, far beyond the minimalist piano twinkles and spacey backdrops generally associated with a meditative audience. Andrea's great contribution here, together with his Ilian Tape kin (Skee Mask, the Zenker Brothers, Fireground et al.), is his ability to furnish an ambient canvas in all its sensuous, time-compressing glory through electronic stylings overtly indebted to club experiences. This gang distinguishes itself through their hybrid approach: where the likes of the Chain Reaction roster have achieved similar things through a singular focus on one core sound, Ilian Tape stretches itself over a broader patchwork of styles, drawing from various schools of breaks, house and techno and using the rich overlap between the three as a basis for vibrant textual explorations. A peak Ilian Tape plays like a seamless tour through every understated club genre replete with enough organic soundscaping to nourish a small garden.
Those who like their meditations variegated and tastefully kinetic can ask for little more, least of all on this record —
Living Room is a calling card for all things hybrid! Unlike Andrea's excellent 2023 outing
Due in Color, which did so well with pure ambience that I struggled to rack up the same mileage from its beat-driven outings, this one is at its best as a halfway house. The likes of "Gesagt" and the album highlight "Reactions" take Andrea's sinuous approach to interweaving textures to new heights while anchoring themselves in firmly percussive bedrock; the album is as likely to skitter into an aqueous chillout as it is to hearken after some distant feeling of suspense, but either way the running thread here is a subtle subversion of clubspace into something more pliable and atmospheric. One swims rather than dances across this dancefloor. As such, Andrea often pulls off heavier beats as though they weigh next to nothing: "Testify"'s insistent 2-step and "Streamline"'s pendulous breakbeat offer him a firm centre of gravity for increasingly elaborate set of background textures, and many tracks' traditionally rhythmic components find themselves steered to alternative ends ("Lorraa"'s bassline distinguishes itself more for its melodic response to the higher frequencies than for its groove, while "Night Zoom"'s paradiddy is twinkling ear-candy long before we start to examine its relationship with the track's stuttering kick pattern. And yet it's not all hybridism: those wishing that Andrea would reaffirm the extreme ends of his spectrum, can take some solace in the ambient washout of opener "Timeline" and aesthetic goldmine "Texture End", or in the late-album table flip "Pure Morning", which spars playfully with the listener across an uncharacteristically abrasive run of stop-start breakbeats.
Consider all bases covered, then. By the sum of its parts,
Living Room is an unwaveringly solid record, built on creative aesthetic pairings and exceptional production chops — but is it true to that title image? It may turn its gaze away from the dancefloor without losing sight of its club roots, but its commitment to an overarching reverie varies considerably from track to track. There's a restlessness here, a simmering baseline of adrenaline fuelled by a percussive focus and relatively high bpms as though Andrea, for all his steady-handed attention to detail within individual tracks, is ultimately too wired to settle in any single space, and instead makes each installment of 'living room' an individual pitstop as he whisks us through a whole suite of possibilities for his sound. For many, this may be a source of appeal – the prospect of a strong hour of selectively-ambient breakbeat excursions is always an easy sell – but I find this record's many moments of excellence to be undercut by its promise of a greater space-out. The atmospheric mastery is all there, but this record is so high on stimulation that its ideal listener will be capable of frankly gymnastic alterations of diffused and focused consciousness. Are you up to that challenge? Don't call me.
