DeepChord Presents Echospace ‎– Liumin

"Burnt Sage" brings the holy and transcedental vibe.

I would usually avoid reviewing an album which has already received so many great reviews but it is rarely that an album comes along that has such an impact on me as Liumin. The Coldest Season was not particularly innovative but was produced to such a high standard that I was wondering where they would go with the follow up. It seemed to be a case of innovate or stagnate. Rod and Steve chose to innovate...

They have changed their whole approach to the music. There is a kind of woozy, detached, druggy atmosphere throughout. The aural equivalent of wondering around the Tokyo metropolis with jet lag. This could have been a recipe for dull abstraction but quite the opposite is true. Luimin delivers some powerful rhythmic and percussive grooves which holds the whole thing together, creating a sense of focus beneath the murky depths. There is a real richness to the music which is helped by judicious use of samples recorded from the Tokyo cityscape. This really helps Liumin to stand up to repeated listens, something that not all Dub-Techno achieves.

Liumin Reduced is also a revelation. It probably represents the best use of field recording I have heard on record. Snippets of conversation, trains rollng by, classical music on the radio are seamlessly mixed with subtle electronics to create a gently intoxicating miasma of sounds. The ultimate late night headphone music.

So these guys have not only bettered The Coldest Season, they have set a new benchmark for electronic music production. If they could better this that really would be something. The album of 2010 in any genre.

Here was an interesting review I read and I'm almost partial to it, this album has really grown on me over this year because of how different it is from anything I've heard in this genre or from these producers.

I was postponing this review until I received my copy in the mail, but I'd never though something else would dethrone it from album of the year in the meantime. But anyway it still receives one major honor: my favorite techno release of all-time. I don't really expect to have many people agreeing with me, but I've never quite heard an album in the genre as well achieved as this one. Rather unexpected since I haven't been impressed much with anything called "dub techno" so far, but for me this release sounds a lot more closer to ambient techno. Cause really it's like an ambient record and a techno record playing at the same time, each one feeding the other and making a perfect musical landscape. It's rather hard to explain why it's so good, cause when I try to analyze it deeply, it's really not all that complex music. Pretty much just repetitive loops playing over ambiance... but there's something about the feeling it conveys, the beats are so deep and with the ambiance over it (or under it if you look at it from a different angle) that it really puts this record over the top. Listening to this really brings you into another world and I have yet to hear another techno release that has moved me this much, it's on another level. You know those records that make you re-think about your whole outlook on a genre, going into territories that you never though could be reached. As you get older these get rarer and rarer, but I'm glad that once in a while it still happens to me. As for the second disc, I haven't even listened to it yet, the first is too good!

This is one of those albums I bought the day it was released (ordered from overseas I think) but never got around to soaking it in until much later because I was distracted by some other music at the time... Wow. I see many have already written great reviews so I won't bother trying to describe the sound, etc. - but in a nutshell this album is top notch. A bit of a departure from early works of Deepchord aka Rod Modell, but certainly not in a bad way at all. Reminds me of some of the early days of the Chain Reaction label; deep, hypnotic and droning. Love it. Great album to sleep to. That's actually a compliment.

Liumin is named after an antiques shop that Modell and Hitchell saw during their stay in Japan - apparently it summarised the whole experience for them. With Tokyo having the highest population density in the world, a journey there can be nothing less than a grand experience; one that Echospace have created in sound.

Unlike the Coldest Season, this album is warm, capturing the late night groove of city life. Instead of a storm, field recordings involve discussions in Japanese merging perfectly into the music and giving the album a laid back energy. Alongside the beautiful chilled Firefly and Burnt Stage, there are a mix of more uptempo dub tracks like BCN Dub, which sounds like a King Tubby track repeated, looped and and broken down, becoming a fragment of a powerful memory. The mix takes you on a cohesive journey that ends with the ambient Warm, just the sort of way I wish that The Coldest Season had.

Liumin Reduced is an excellent addition, consisting of pure field recordings and some downtempo drones - this work definitely involves Modell more than Hitchell, the former of whom is very interested in the idea of capturing the vibrations of a location using field recordings. I'm sure than anybody who is a fan of dub techno can appreciate the atmosphere and beauty of this second half, it's fantastic.

Every time you think that dub techno has stagnated, Echospace take the genre in a new direction. Liumin is another outstanding release by these guys.

Deepchord Presents Echospace Liumin, Liumin Reduced
Nearly a new album of Echospace works spread out over two hours worth of music. It's not really what should be called the follow up to the Coldest Season. Liumin comes off more as a sonic travelogue, than an actual album. The sound and feel of Liumin, while retaining something of what we've come to know as the expanding yet contracting world of Echospace. Liumin has reduced the sound to a far more singular and relentless one than that of Coldest Season. It's not trying to be song like, or based in the least and as a document, I don't expect it to. The most driving and percussive are Sub-Marine, Maglev, and BCN Dub. Firefly lingers and is sustainable whereas It goes much deeper and drifting with Summer Haze, Float, and Burnt Stage.
Surface noise and artifact is assumed to be part of the vocabulary in any deepchord related product. Liumin seems to be more about the distressed document itself, and the sound overall is a lot less clear and of a more drifting and track based nature. Whether it's by design or by fact of it these being live sessions and the inclusion of the reduced extra disc of Field recording pieces to make the point clear that this is a collected document, and not really an album.
Liumin Reduced is field and incidental music. As such, it is an excellent document and almost more rewarding than Liumin for what kind of spaces it can create and be used within. It is very much something to put on at a lowered volume, or have playing in another room entirely. It is something to weave into the soundtrack for a lazy afternoon. It is something to fall asleep to.
This album is about a the sounds of a hazy and gauzy surface over a well defined content with its pristine structure and audio architecture. There are really no stops in the pieces, only passageways in between them. Each track emerges pretty much fully defined out of a field of background patter and drifts along with a few subtle shifts as sounds arc over and off of the surface. Like other sessions rendered or found by the extended Deepchord nebula. There's an interest in street percussion and everyday sounds and the specificity of location/field recording where texture and sound lingers and will shift depending on your proximity to the source which only exists until it no longer can be heard.
Due to the travelogue nature where voices play the largest part in between the cuts, one could almost surmise it's a best of 'live' compilation. In use. These are powerful pieces to work with for building and carrying a sessions movement into vast new spaces. As an album to listen to. It falls somewhat short of delivering.

 

I am always hungry for new music. I think I continue to consume the sounds, so that I can recreate that moment. That moment of when one hears that sound, and is taken away out of this world into another. That moment, reminiscent of your childhood memories, when you would put on your headphones and melt away in the hypnotic beat beyond all thought and worries. It is the music you would turn to, for answers and escape. Remember? I do. And so I search, among the hundreds of albums, for the one that would bring back those memories, and take me to that place. What can I say? I think with Liumin I have found it. Big thanks to Rod Modell and Stephen Hitchell of echospace [detroit]. First of all, I think it's a huge plus, when an album seamlessly transitions from one track to another. That solidifies my reasoning for listening from beginning to end. The tracks flow smoothly, in that velvety, dubbed out, and incredibly hypnotic beat. The duo is not apologetic for letting the tracks evolve over the ten minute marker. Although some may find this rolling rhythm a bit repetitive, I think that it's only after the first six or seven minutes that the mind latches on to the beat and new environments unfold. If there was a science behind this process, then Hitchell and Modell should base their thesis on their work, their magic, and their art. Incredibly simplistic, yet awesomely complex percussion is drenched in vaporous white noise, as it envelopes the chords that swirl around in the stereo field of infinite dimensions. Complimented with a touch of field recordings captured by Modell in Tokyo, Japan, the kick trends on, falling out of the foreground of the typical warehouse sound system, into the ether of organic pulse. For me, the absolute masterpieces on the album include "BCN Dub" and "Maglev". The latter, in particular, takes me to a mysterious place, elusive in its existence, with hidden doors and passages that only open up somewhere in the middle of the track. Liumin is the duo's second full length album, releasing under the alias DeepChord Presents Echospace for Boomkat's Modern Love. Of course, both have been pretty active in their Chicago and Detroit dub techno scenes. Rod Modell has recently released Incense & Black Light Plop, 2007) and a two-track 60-minute dedication to Michael Mantra (Silentes, 2007), while Stephen Hitchell has been busy releasing remixes on Kompakt and Echocord as well as his critically acclaimed 2009 beauty, The Seduction Of Silence on echospace [detroit]. Together, they have been making quite a splash on the scene of dubbed out minimal beats, specifically after the absolutely incredible The Coldest Season back in 2007. This double-disk release, contains a bonus 80-minute CD with the original field recordings from Tokyo. This second place is only accessible after you've made the journey through the hollow caverns of Liumin, revealing itself like a secret garden hidden deep beneath the earth. This is indeed a surreal, almost narcotic, experience, which, like that most treasured childhood memory, is a momentous trip. Move over Basic Channel, and let the boys from echospace impress you for a change.

This is a mind blowing record. Completely different journey than "The coldest season", and certainly a huge step forward in developing ambient/dub-techno genre. The second CD is particularly interesting, as it sucks the listener into a sonic environment from which he doesn't feel like going anywhere else, anytime. All the tracks are perfectly interwoven into each other, the sounds, the noise, the voices of people - very emotional and captivating. An absolute star of 2010. All 5 stars for this release.

At the end of 2010, I am quite convinced their first album "The Coldest Season" will be remembered as one of the best the genre had to offer post in the 90's. This has yet to be equaled by anything related to ambient dub, dub techno or post-Berlin/basic channel. I've sampled, heard, or own a copy of as much of what has come before and since as anyone with this predilection. It's so subtly melodic that it transcends the genre of their deservedly acclaimed "forebearers" Rhythm & Sound. There's really nothing like it, including the 2010 follow-up "Liumin" which is nice, but does not massage the brain and calm the pulse like the ironically warmer "The Coldest Season". Innovation totally without pretense or forced eclecticism. A perfect electronic recording in my book.

Now we have "Liumin" an interesting album sounding quite unlike the first one before it "The Coldest Season". The first album I discovered after hearing "Liumin" and had missed out on their original conceptual basis of music and ideas behind sound theory. These albums are very different and are also quite hard to compare, I think is is best to hear them in different environments to try for a new experience each listen. The greatest feature about Echospace as a duo is their ability to sound familiar but also to sound different, an ability to take something of the past and push it into the future. I understand why all the accolades were given and why their albums will remain an influence on electronic music for decades to come. I offer my highest recommendation to seek out their work.

Ultimately, I have mixed feelings about this release. It is far above average dub techno, enough so that I consider it a top release from 2010. On the other hand, this album was not what I was expecting. Echospace's debut album, The Coldest Season, was just as it sounds. Cold, non-playful (aside from the closing track) dub techno. Liumin is quite a different story. This time around Echospace have created something much more club friendly and rhythmic. Honestly, it reminds me of their cv313 alias quite a bit and sometimes shocks me that it wasn't released under that moniker. Odds are if you're a fan of Rod Modell and co. you will love this one, but just don't expect The Coldest Season part 2. Its worth noting that BCN Dub is one of the best ways you can possibly spend 12 minutes of your life. The 2nd CD, which is a bonus for early buyers, contains field recordings used throughout the first CD. I actually enjoy this disc better then the album... Its simply the sounds of people talking, various animals, cars, trains and general environments from Japan. There are drones and lower pitched electronics thrown in from time to time. Fan of Echospace or not, this disc is worth admission alone.