- Describing themselves as "post-Autonomic," Montreal's DAAT have made it their mission to explore the unknown frontiers of drum & bass, aligning them with labels like Samurai Horo and Exit that dismantle the genre or move it away from the dance floor. Over two albums and a handful of 12-inches, DAAT have gone further and further afield; with their fourth EP on Detuned Transmissions, they're practically off the radar. DTND004 is an illusory, hard-to-parse four-tracker that contains some of the duo's most bewitching yet frustrating music.
The EP imagines a planet "fully colonised by technology," where "the distinction between living organisms and machines is ambiguous." The music, which is entirely freeform, indeed blurs the boundaries between the living and the mechanical. In the eight-minute opener "7D," waves gently crest on an ocean shore, but it's hard to tell if those sounds are natural or something else altogether. All the while, the track dips in and out of a drum & bass beat structure like a machine with a mind of its own. It's a startling effect, but sometimes I wish DAAT would stick to a single pool of atmospherics longer before dipping into the next one.
"Rust" begins with ghostly drones before settling into a slow, hesitant stagger, while "33" blankets the background with the sounds of airplanes taking off. Their field recordings are blended with ominous melodies that hint at something more human, an emotional counterpart to the mechanistic sounds. With it unintelligible radio transmissions and other voices, "33" is the most complete take on DAAT's vaguely creepy and captivating vision. Compare it to "ABVD," a bleary sound collage full of neat FX that doesn't quite cohere. DAAT are ambitious, but they're still finding their way around the vast, confusing world they've built for themselves.
TracklistA1 7D
A2 ABVD
B1 33
B2 Rust