- Dusk Notes is a fitting name for the label co-run by New York's Soramimi. Her second solo EP is twilight music, caught between a familiar stern techno idiom and something harder to define. The music hovers in this middle zone, touching on promising ideas but rarely giving them full shape. Lead track "Pure Rubedo" is illustrative, its thudding kick drum a thread connecting disparate moods—fizzing synth vapours, watery bleeps and moments of tense stasis. Rather than having a coherent conversation, these moods avoid each other like wary strangers. The results have the spark of originality, but it never quite catches alight.
It's a similar story with EP's other dance floor number, "Core Value." Its artful mosaics of reverbed bleeps and clicks could make for nice peak-time hypnosis, but the kick drum—a strange, tangy sound lacking supporting percussion—throttles the energy. Things get deeper and stranger on the B-side. "Blood Sugar"'s gauzy drone-textures duck in sidechained concert over muffled low-end. "Carmine Gong Wash" is, as the title suggests, four and a half minutes of fluid pads suffused with the smoky resonances of a struck gong. "Stellium In Sapphire" nudges towards New Age, its meandering chords accompanied by distant synthetic animal calls. A downtempo drum loop enters in the latter half but doesn't go anywhere much. As with other parts of the EP, it feels like an opportunity missed.
TracklistA1 Pure Rubedo
A2 Core Value
B1 Blood Sugar
B2 Carmine Gong Wash
B3 Stellium In Sapphire