- Tyler Friedman earns his keep mostly outside dance music, working with, among others, the Turner Prize-nominated Otolith Group. In 2012, a couple of singles for Kontra-Music marked his arrival on the dance floor; a follow-up has come only recently. At a glance, Friedman's style of techno seems a bit outmoded these days, being so dedicated to the tenets of minimal—crisp sonics, long-form structures and the conviction that you can get away with weird shit so long as you put a kick drum under it. But he pursues these rules so rigorously, and in such a distinctive way, that his music floats free of trends.
Judging by the contents of this record, Friedman spent the last few years developing and deepening his craft. The tracks are even longer (both hover around the 20-minute mark), the textures richer and the moods stranger. The record is a partner piece to last year's Ccb: Bb: Bbb: Jj LP—both deploy synth textures that swell and recede with the patterned randomness of cell growth—but this time around Friedman explores a particularly lush nocturnal mood.
"Vulkalaunai" is an invigorating deep-sea plunge, its isolated synth tones building into large reef-like structures that teem with strange life. Friedman descends pretty far, but pitter-patter drums serve as a lifeline to the surface. "Wallouian" is knottier. Its bell-like clusters might have sounded tender once, but they seem to be rapidly disintegrating, as if we're hearing decomposition in time-lapse. Once again things get ever denser and more volatile, and the drums build up a jittery but controlled energy. At the track's peak, Friedman accesses a huge and intensely disorienting space. True to the minimal credos, he tends to ignore traditional musical narrative in favour of more winding paths. Music this sumptuous is a pleasure to get lost in.
TracklistA Vulkalaunai
B Wallouian