Beaumont Hannant - Texturology

Thirteen years after its release, this and the contemporary, comparable "limited" issue still sound like the future, the past and the present. Picking elements that work in various musical subgenres while ditching their dodgy parts, Hannant blends the leftovers into a combination that, in theory, has limited chances of success. Nonetheless, "trance" melodies, "electro" programming, "industrial" percussions, "ambient" soundscapes all mix and create something else, uncategorisable, that must have confused music reviewers of the mid-nineties who had to make up new terms to define this kind of things.
IDM it became, then, and the name does not do the music justice too well: Music, yes; Dance, not necessarily, as it at least as suitable for armchair listening; Intelligent, well, it is not of the brainless kind and does tend to leave the mind wander about freely, that is for sure, but to call it intelligent seems quite pompous and gives the composer pretentions they might not have had. The even vaguer 'electronica' is perhaps more appropriate.
Anyway, the content mostly oscillates between dreamy, hypnotic and eerie with a clever rhythmic drive and, one can imagine, would be an ideal soundtrack for night driving or, more poetically, sleepwalking. The production is enormous and the attention to detail that permeates throughout Beaumont Hannant's work is certainly here at its peak.
One of those relatively unknown albums that would deserve a recurrent mention in the "which records would you take on a desert island" polls.