- There's always been something provocative about Anstam's music. It combines unlikely genres into bombastic hybrids, favouring excess and the bizarre over tasteful restraint. So this new EP for Macro, under his younger Anno Stamm alias, is a surprise—it lacks the proggy extravagance and madcap left turns you might expect. Instead, its three tracks build on one of the producer's very chillest cuts—last year's "Sensing Social Sirens" on All City—to explore a kind of pensive techno, stable of groove and shot through with delicate melody.
OK, there are hints of the producer's urge to disrupt. On "Stammophin" it's the cheeky melody that punctures the pastoral mood partway through. And on "Stammotan" it's the sharp synthetic teeth on the bassline, and those clumsy plumes of reverb puffing out behind it. These moments jar slightly at first, but they also give the tracks a distinctive charge. It's a combination of the soothing and the unsettling, familiar from classic IDM. The closing track, "Stammophorm," makes the influence explicit. Over a gorgeous kick-and-click beat, brassy chords pull gently but firmly on the heartstrings. Not very Anstam, but not bad either.
TracklistA1 Stammophin
B1 Stammotan
B2 Stammophorm