- You can tell that Tyler Friedman's latest track comes from the same sessions as his recent LP and single for Kontra-Musik. The same crisp and strange sounds are used, stitched into hyper-detailed mosaics that fall somewhere between rhythm and mercurial melody. But it's also easy to see why "YYY" was set aside for a separate release. Deep and aquatic but without the more disorienting qualities of Vulkalaunai / Wallouian, it's one of Friedman's prettiest tracks. Across 12 minutes, he masterfully sculpts layers of bell-tones, bleeps and clicks, over which delay trails ripple like heat mirages. Holding it together is an ascending melody, rising from the bass to ring out in the high register like synthetic birdcalls.
The track is paired with a remix featuring percussionist and Max Loderbauer collaborator Samuel Rohrer, on whose Arjunamusic label the record appears. Well, "remix" is pushing it: the original's elements are mostly only present as rhythmic patterns, performed by Rohrer on a range of percussion instruments. The structure they're built into, featuring improvised vocals from Tora Augestad, is entirely new. Rohrer's drums are a departure from Friedman's usual synthetic sound world, but they're stitched together with the same attention to detail and the same ear for winding-but-purposeful structure. Augestad offers a few different wordless melodies at the opening, before the whole thing descends into a smoky percussion workout, led by a talking drum part that swerves drunkenly across the crisp 4/4 pulse. The last few minutes settle into a more stable groove. The live percussion gives it more bounce than Friedman's original, but the post-Villalobos idiom is still unmistakably his.
TracklistA1 Tyler Friedman - YYY
B1 Tyler Friedman & Samuel Rohrer - YYY (Drum & Vocal Dub)