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Twine, "Recorder"
Twine make electronic music that's not ABOUT electronic music.
Bip-Hop
Twine's latest release should prove to those still skeptical that electronic music need not be so self-referential. A fair number of releases by Twine's various contemporaries focus the lens inward so much that the technique of making music becomes the message the music conveys. Worshipping the glitch and abusing the ones and zeros are certainly useful modes within which many artists have produced stellar works. Thankfully though, Twine leave the acoustic mirror at home and choose to focus more on using electronic means to covey something else entirely. Sure, Recorder has more than its fair share of clicky rhythms, shuffling distortion, and production trickery that moves drones and digital blips around in space like a blender, but what it also has is soul. The opening track, None Some Silver frames an acoustic guitar passage with just enough buzz and synthetic blur that you know this isn't Mississippi Delta music, but it doesn't lose the feeling of a creaky rocking chair on a southern porch. Twine uses subtle shifts in the background of tracks to move them forward and the ambience is melancholy, but not overbearing. Simple rhythmic patterns that usually stop just short of being beats roll through some of the tracks, while others like Player Piano rely more on oddly filtered samples and that signature sample pop of intentionally sloppy loop points to create a kind of rustic-electro feel. Resonant filters are used freely to taint the sounds, draw them out of their original source environments, and into the rusty landscape that Twine creates here. The album ends much like it began, as a drawn out organ melody drifts into space, with the sun fragments of stories surface and recede, and a looped bit of static serves as the night song of binary cicadas on a hot August evening.
Twine's latest release should prove to those still skeptical that electronic music need not be so self-referential. A fair number of releases by Twine's various contemporaries focus the lens inward so much that the technique of making music becomes the message the music conveys. Worshipping the glitch and abusing the ones and zeros are certainly useful modes within which many artists have produced stellar works. Thankfully though, Twine leave the acoustic mirror at home and choose to focus more on using electronic means to covey something else entirely. Sure, Recorder has more than its fair share of clicky rhythms, shuffling distortion, and production trickery that moves drones and digital blips around in space like a blender, but what it also has is soul. The opening track, None Some Silver frames an acoustic guitar passage with just enough buzz and synthetic blur that you know this isn't Mississippi Delta music, but it doesn't lose the feeling of a creaky rocking chair on a southern porch. Twine uses subtle shifts in the background of tracks to move them forward and the ambience is melancholy, but not overbearing. Simple rhythmic patterns that usually stop just short of being beats roll through some of the tracks, while others like Player Piano rely more on oddly filtered samples and that signature sample pop of intentionally sloppy loop points to create a kind of rustic-electro feel. Resonant filters are used freely to taint the sounds, draw them out of their original source environments, and into the rusty landscape that Twine creates here. The album ends much like it began, as a drawn out organ melody drifts into space, with the sun fragments of stories surface and recede, and a looped bit of static serves as the night song of binary cicadas on a hot August evening. samples:
