Bola – Soup

Would love to see a vinyl re-issue of this beauty.. Whoblo is the maddest track.

I would say they don't make them like this anymore, but they hardly did even in 1998. So it makes sense that this was apparently mostly recorded in 1993-4.

Classic Bola / Skam release. Loved this at the time and love it even more in 2021. Aged marvellously.

Truly alien technologies communicating in tandem with ambient sensibilities that let the AI breech the surface of experiences only mankind could previously perpetrate. Soup is a thousand years away and yet always so close, like cyberspace. Darrell Fitton has tapped into the alleyways of some decrepit piping system, and finds beauty in the muddied puddles reflecting throat-tightening billboards and lighted signals above increasingly thick layers of humanity.

I almost - *almost* being the key word - think Mr. Fitten didn't realize how brilliant his music was at the beginning, because it's not often you get a song like Forcasa 3 to just happen to be on your debut album. To this day, this is *the* most beautiful melody I have ever heard from an IDM producer and perhaps any electronic music producer, for that matter. When you hear that bassline start, I don't care what mood you are in, you are going to get emotional. It's one of the most timeless IDM/Ambient tracks (of all time? PARADOX!) and I still can't stop listening to it, 22 years later. Damn you Darrell. In a good way.

This music catches the scent of mystery...just like Mr. Namlook same titled track.
Spellbinding.

Underrated and still relatively unknown "classic"!! And a great shame too as this is quite literally the wasps ankles when it comes down to late 90's moody electronic music. I'm not very keen on the direction Darrell Fitton took his music after this though. 10 out of 10.

To be heard in the dark ! Just fantasic. A complete universe at itself. +++ Classic !.

A pure IDM classic. Only few reached/can reach this level of perfectness. There are two beyond earth, space, time (and words) tracks here ("Pendulus" and "Whoblo"), and one of the most beautiful opening tracks ever made in electronic music ("Glink"). From the rest, "W.I.K.", "Forcasa 2" and "Aquilla", stand out, imho.
Sound production is also amazing. Before '98's "Soup", it was only the two Front 242's '93 albums that got me as impressed. Fitton gives the sense of an extra dimension to his sound, and It's obvious he paid extreme attention to the low-freq part of his music, which was a missing piece for the most of the mid-'90s IDM artists.

I honestly would've paid my 25 bucks and more to get my hands on the first and last tracks. If albums were priced based on quality like food is, then this album would cost 200 dollars!