- Taking Ilian Tape's drum & bass and techno hybrids to hazy new highs, Andrea's second LP is another home run.
- There's a mist that hangs over Andrea's second album. It's not the usual weed haze of Ilian Tape records, but instead something more tangible, a thick fog that makes everything around it feel sloshy and exaggerated, like a natural form of reverb. The LP opens with a distant and beautiful soundscape, occasionally interrupted by massive breakbeats that strike like thunderbolts before disappearing, a jolt that lets you know you're in for a pretty heady experience with Due In Colour. Most of the drums on the album feel like this, punchy and powerful as if played by a jazz musician, even in the most tender moments. Using dance music genres more as artistic canvases than club tools, the Italian producer collapses drum & bass, techno and jazz into 12 tidal waves of sound.
A good example is "Hazymo," which is based around a sample of what sounds like a real live drum kit. On the surface, it's basically acid jazz—a lazy tempo, shuffling drums, blocky piano chords. But it's coated in some otherworldly dust, a sonic smokescreen that makes the rough shapes feel profound. Ditto "Ress," which reminds me a little of St. Germain if he were an incorrigible stoner. The flailing drums are virtuosic, but they fight through a thicket of celestial synths that feels like the aural equivalent of trudging through a low-visibility blizzard, enjoying the snatches of what you can see and hear along the way. "Lush In End," sounds like sped-up trip-hop, while a staggered thump on "Sephr" touches on early dubstep and LA beat scene records, with warm squalls of bass that propel the track's leaden feet forward.
There are real moments of beauty here, and astonishing tracks that remind me of Andrea's label-mate Skee Mask at his best. "Remote Working" taps into '90s psychedelia with a twitchy drum & bass electro hybrid rhythm, and a repeating melody that wraps around the beat like a hug. There are moments where it sounds like the chord progression is hitting the wrong note, and blasts of sanded-down white noise, which make the track feel alive and unpredictable. It's a bubbly, joyous track that belies the darker textures underneath. And even the ambient cuts like "Dove Mai" have a certain pull to them, like the wispy byproducts of a Deepchord Presents Echospace record, floating away blissfully into the ether.
Like so many Ilian Tape records, the genius of Due In Colour is how drum & bass and techno coexist and even bleed into each other. The ingredients are largely the same as Andrea's stunning debut album, Ritorno, but with a musician's hand this time, a hand freed from worrying about how the tracks would work on CDJs. With leisurely pace and touches of jazz and improvisation, Due In Colour presents Ilian Tape techno as a hybrid befitting cafés and concert halls, part of the Munich label's continued mission to redefine and recontextualize techno right under our noses.
Tracklist01. Jaim
02. Audieze
03. Ress
04. Remote Working
05. Silent Now
06. Sephr
07. Lush In End (Drum Version)
08. Dove Mai
09. Chessbio
10. Hazymo
11. Am Der
12. Return Lei