- OOBE's Opal Tapes debut is a collection of tracks simply named "SFTCR I," "SFTCR II" and so on, arranged in a random order. That listening to the EP makes me ponder the titles' meaning and not their pretentiousness speaks volumes about the quality of the music.
Though this is ambient techno, most of SFTCR is a lot more ambient than techno. OOBE, whoever she or he is, crafts a series of tracks that throw up more questions than they answer. Vocal samples on "SFTCR III" and "SFTCR V" are filtered, truncated and jumbled until they fall far short of resembling human speech, and on "SFTCR VIII" the cacophony of a crowd is dulled into background noise. "SFTCR V" lumbers along suffused with a Burial-esque melancholy, and there are also hints of his nocturnal gloom on the more percussive tracks. The techno pulse is more pronounced on "SFTCR II," though the drum machine hits sound like they've been coated in muck, as bit-crushed synth melodies dart from left to right, while the beat stutters and buzzes on "STFCR X" like a flickering bulb. Tracks fade inexplicably with little resolution, and though they sound half-finished, it's partly this scrappiness that makes SFTCR so beguiling.
Tracklist01. SFTCR I
02. SFTCR III
03. SFTCR V
04. SFTCR II
05. SFTCR VIII
06. SFTCR X