Equulei - Delicate

, Mar 15, 2005

Equulei produces three distinct slabs of icy funk on this release. Delicate is a nice electro track. Cold, mechanized beats are chopped up and smoothed over with warm synthpads, reverb and some subtly used static and glitch. It serves as a nice set up for the other two tracks, easing the listener naturally into the aural equivalent of some cavernous disco. The second track on the A side, Telos remixed by Cacheflower, is all spooky and drifting melody eventually gnarled and contorted, puncutated by unsettling rapid fire metallic beats and lots of glitch. Things get very dark on the B side with Iamyourliberator - a dark deliberately paced tune that occupies a region between techno and electro. At first fixed to a steady hip hop beat, it builds itself up with raw, noisy blasts and then sweeps the growing mood of malevolence away and opens up to stretched out synths and neutral ambience. A subterranean vocoder intones at you deeply, and though the potential for this to sound cheesy is there, somehow it works. The track becomes a intense, minimal techno track towards the end, harsh and very distorted until it finally relaxes its hold on you.

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