- Anyone with a vinyl fetish and a taste for greyscale sounds will know about SNTS. Back in 2012, he dropped the debut of his Chapter series in a limited run of 200. It sounded like techno forged in a crypt, haunted and delirious with evil spirits, and it didn't stay in stock for long. Parts two and three followed suit the year after. SNTS retained his anonymity by donning a black mask and keeping out of sight, which carries on today. His sound and shadowy demeanour made him the ideal candidate for Horizontal Ground, who snapped him up for two exquisite cuts of smoggy, electrified techno. The atmospheres intensified, the ghoulish mists thickened.
The three-part, self-released Scene series brought chilled ambient into his repertoire. It's all been very rhythmic and considered so far, each record full and complete in itself and yet alluding to something much bigger. A slipstream force is at work on SNTS's debut album, The Rustling Of Leaves. You're invariably pulled through the record as it gradually piles on gently pulsing percussion and swirling, smoky timbres.
The music here is a lot more loopy and hypnotic than we're used to from SNTS, which lends itself perfectly to the longer format. Tracks roll on and on sometimes, giving you time and space to approach apparitions that until now have mostly lurked in the background; on The Rustling Of The Leaves they've taken full command. Polar Inertia offers up the album's longest production with a remix of "Oblivion." It's almost twice as long as the original, though it doesn't feel like it. SNTS's version is that mysteriously interminable.
Opening with three acts of undulating ambient-techno, the album appears to change tack in its final quarter. The ghouls still wail behind "Estrangement," but the loose, tribal drumming has gotten more insistent. "Roots Trapped In The Ground" concludes The Rustling Of The Leaves in a cacophony of thunder and distortion. There's something nightmarish about the music that wasn't there before. Gone are the wispy allusions that shrouded the steely machine driving Leaves all along. Finally, all the power and energy SNTS carries is laid bare.
TracklistA1 Leniency
A2 Oblivion
B1 Oblivion (Polar Inertia Remix)
B2 Backwoods
C1 Theory Of Loneliness
C2 Remission
D1 Estrangement
D2 Roots Trapped In The Ground