Blond:ish: Welcome To The Present (CD, Kompakt, October 2015)


You know I don't like to leap to judgements, but I'm going to go ahead and call it: this record from Canadian duo Anstascia D'Elene Corniere and Vivie-ann Bakos is the most exciting thing I've heard from Kompakt in, ooh, about a decade. It's a blend of minimal house burblings (lead single Endless Games has a lovely Gui Boratto-ish warmth), laid back psychedelia, field recordings, and sampled vocals and traditional instrumentation from around the world. Done wrong, this could have been spectacularly annoying — even quirky. But I love every bit of this record. Its magpie-like attitude to sounds never strays into exoticism for exoticism's sake, and everything seems to flow together effortlessly, to a really pleasing effect. It ends strongly, too, with the shuffling tech and rootsish vocals of Inner Jungle (the vocals are Sunru Carter), and the strangely wonderful It Starts Now which gives a talk on meditation and spirituality by Alan Watts a piano-led backing track and sounds far better than you could imagine that ever would. Every time I listen to this record I hear some new sound, and I'm impressed again by the skill with which it's put together, and all in all it makes me very happy.

I bought this from Boomkat. They call it Techno / House.

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