- One of Seattle's most exciting producers shares an LP's worth of fuzzy experimental soundscapes touching on everything from ambient to industrial to trance.
- Seattle is often overlooked when it comes to electronic music. It's never had the renown for a specific style like its Canadian neighbour to the north, and it doesn't have the historical bona fides as San Francisco to the south. But the city does have a vibrant dance music community and history. It was the home of the famed Decibel Festival up until 2015, and later underground parties like TUF Festival and the invite-only The Lodge at Mt. Rainier became go-tos for West Coast heads. The Emerald City also boasts a wealth of talented producers and DJs, from the lean grooves of Flora FM to the chuggy industrial creep of Sharlese. If you need an introduction to what makes Seattle so exciting, tondiue's 2021 debut EP is as good a place to start as any.
Landing on Seattle's quintessential secondnature imprint—the label and party promoters who are the fulcrum of the scene—it was, as, Andrew Ryce put it, "one of the best debut records… all year." Painted Creature was like a waterlogged Polaroid picture of the past 20 years of dance music—fuzzy techno met bubbling downtempo, euphoric trance met meditative breakbeat. Harvest, their follow-up, is a totally different beast. Composed of two "site-specific compositions," the A-side, "Lilypad," was written for Seattle's premier experimental arts festival, Ground Hum, and the B-Side, "Koye," for Active/Passive, another experimental music festival held off the coast of British Columbia. These two continuous pieces (split into individual tracks on the digital release) are mercurial interpretations of a wide range of electronic music at the lower, slower end of the club spectrum.
It's easy to get swept up in the meditative beauty of "Lilypad," where vibrato chords move across the stereo fluctuating in intensity and volume. But as the track builds, this gossamer-like beauty disintegrates in an acid bath of electronic noise somewhere between a Spazio Disponibile and a Minimal Wave release. There are 303 squelches and metallic shakers, while a vocal sample muses on the difficulty of people connecting with the nonhuman world. But just as tonduie hits a techno climax, the track crumbles, reassembling itself as a breakbeat slow jam. This isn't an ambient soundtrack for sunrise on the Pacific coast, as much as it is an IDM-meets-industrial symphony suited for mushroom trips on Mars.
"Koye" is a bit more linear, but no less detailed and immersive. It's a slower and more gradual build as undulating drones give way to a downtempo trance meditation à la Mixmaster Morris. Little squeaking synths gradually open up the track, like mice chirping in the walls (maybe I've been watching too much TV with my two year-old, but I kept thinking about this scene in Ratatouille). Around 13 minutes in, they introduce a kick drum and the synths become more elastic and rubbery with little flecks of acid, a sampled vocal chant, and a flurry of arpeggios.
Harvest is the second release on Fever AM's experimental sub-label, Syn Syn. It shouldn't be much of a surprise that the likes of Mor Elian and Rhyw are into tondiue, who seems to have the strength to become a rising star in the weirdo corner of the technoverse that Fever AM has carved out for itself. Harvest is another outstanding release and will hopefully help garner the Emerald City the attention it deserves as one of the most exciting outcrops for American electronic music.
Tracklist01. Lilypad
02. Koye