- Samuel van Dijk brings his heavenly electro and techno a little closer to earth on this more emotive record.
- Over the course of a decade, Samuel van Dijk's music as VC-118A has struck a careful balance between beauty and austerity, between dub techno and electro (and, sometimes, ambient). His music is exquisite ear candy, and the often flight-themed material can sound like the effortless, mechanical soar of autonomous aircraft. What his music lacks in emotion it makes up for in scale and elegance, like a well-shot photo of cruising above the clouds or a look at Earth from outer space. Waves Of Change, however, puts a little heart on his bomber jacket sleeve, blurring the lines between electro and techno more than ever before and adding a healthy layer of melody.
There's something newly warm about Waves Of Change. The stuttering beeps in "The Deep," which jump and lag like a palpitating heartbeat. On "Stream," a clacking drum pattern kicks up a racket over a glacial chord progression that recalls both Stars Of The Lid and the IDM touches of 2016's excellent Shift Register album. van Dijk moves sneakily between techno and electro, abandoning Detroit worship for something spacier on the rippling "You," which hurtles through the air like a satellite gone off course. And "Replace Image" finds a happy middle ground between electro and slo-mo techno, only for "Elektri" to pick things up with a surprisingly brusque, choppy techno drum pattern.
Another thing that Waves Of Change has going for it is the sequencing. Whether it's the easy transition from the Autonomic-leaning opener "Heat" into the heavily textural "The Deep"—like putting on glasses in the correct prescription after a year or two of suffering—each track compliments the last, a gentle up-and-down that avoids the meandering pace of previous LPs.
The centerpiece is appropriately right in the middle: "Motherboard," a percussive techno track with angelic melodies and snippets of van Dijk's parents originally recorded in the '80s, sometimes chattering and sometimes reciting poetry. It's the closest thing his music has ever come to personal, and it's one of the most towering tracks in his catalogue, equalled only by the equally crunchy, gut-wrenching closer "Ufonic," another example of the neat symmetry that makes Waves Of Change worth revisiting over and over. On his fifth album, van Dijk finds lets some welcome feeling—and grit—into his sonic perfection.
Tracklist01. Heat
02. The Deep
03. Stream
04. Glub
05. Motherboard
06. You
07. Replace Image
08. Echo Drop
09. Elektri
10. Ufonic