Tucker Martine is a producer and sound recordist, responsible for the critically lauded Broken Hearted Dragonflies: Insect Electronica from Southeast Asia and a number of other projects too various to mention. Orchestra Dim Bridgesis their first collaborative album, even though they've worked togetheron past projects. The album is not quite what I might have initiallyexpected from the two. I was thinking of something along the lines ofimprovisation on the violin from Kang with production flourishes andfield recordings from Martine. What they've done instead is altogethermore calculated, a unique sort of instrumental post-rock album thatthrows everything including the kitchen faucet into the mix, throwingeverything at the wall and seeing what sticks. There is a definite lackof any immutable formula here; one track might be a simple guitarmelody with shuffling beats; another a chamber quartet obscured bydigitally textured surface noise; and another a dizzying assemblage oflaptop spliced snippets of audio drawn from instrumental performances,field recordings and ethnic plunderphonia. Tucker Martine has a clearpredilection for busy, overworked arrangements full of minute audiodetails, evidenced by tracks such as "Baseer Ornamental," in which arather lovely Oriental violin melody is constantly upstaged byMartine's galaxy of spliced-in effects. This eclecticism, whileinteresting at first, eventually becomes tiring, and by the end of thisbrief album I was left feeling somewhat shortchanged. Although he isundeniably talented, Martine reminds me of the dissatisfied painter whokeeps returning to a finished canvas, adding little background toucheshere and there, until the painting is completely overwhelmed withsuperfluous decoration and has to be scrapped. It's the producer's jobto know when to step back and let the music stand, and save for acouple of tracks, Orchestra Dim Bridges sounds like ahyperactive child set loose in a sound library with a pair of electricshears and a tub of epoxy, which unsurprisingly does not yield veryinteresting results. samples:
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