Funky Doodle - Live From Yellowknife

  • DJ Richard, Draveng and James K deliver a desolate ambient set.
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  • The one-off New Year's Day concert DJ Richard, Draveng and James K played as Funky Doodle was anything but celebratory. Supposedly recorded live in Yellowknife, a small city in Canada's Northwest Territories, their Live From Yellowknife, suggests a blizzard can happen anywhere, even your mind. The biggest influence on Live From Yellowknife's three tracks is Robert Turman & Aaron Dilloway's Blizzard, a seething yet reserved set the veteran experimentalists recorded during a 2009 snowstorm in Ohio. DJ Richard seems taken by Blizzard's minimal synth bleakness—he's played it on several radio shows. For Live From Yellowknife, the trio gathered a couple friends and set off into the figurative (or literal, depending on how seriously you take the press release) wilderness to plumb their own vision of sonic desolation. It's an excellent prompt. Each of these ambient tracks achieves the grim sublimity of previous offerings like DJ Richard's "Dissolving World". The set has the spontaneous texture befitting a noisy improv trio. Field recordings and modular squiggles joust over funereal chords on the A1, while the closing track features what sounds like an incensed dolphin over a dolorous, two-note bassline. While downcast, these three pieces manage to have a calming effect while flying in the face of the odious "ambient as self-care" narrative. A sparse, New Year's meditation on wintry doom, Live From Yellowknife is a surprisingly chill experience.
  • Tracklist
      A1 Live From Yellowknife B1 Live From Yellowknife B2 Live From Yellowknife
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