- Eight years after Sleepstep, Dasha Rush returns with a meticulous, gently rhythmic and exquisite ambient LP.
- Her artist name might make you think that Dasha Rush is always going fast and relentlessly—a bit like her touring schedule. Or maybe you'd think that from listening to some of the older, industrial-leaning techno EPs on Sonic Groove since her debut on Adam X’s label with 2010's Sonic State. But in reality she's introspective and patient, not only with the pace of her releasing—this is her first album since 2015's Sleepstep—but also the content. Her new LP is called Contemplating, after all, and moves away from the more cathartic aspects of her music towards a more reflective style.
Sleepstep was already a beautiful, generous collection of tracks that toyed with that state between dozing and waking, contrasting gentle ballads with noisier, more dramatic pieces. Rush is largely a techno DJ but has never restricted herself to formats or genres, as her first album Forms Ain’t Formats made its manifesto. She easily floats between "dark and filthy" techno, gabber, ambient electronica and spoken-word, but its those last two zones that take up the most space on Contemplating.
Composed of nine tracks, Contemplating is shorter and more unified than Sleepstep, and more of what you consider an "ambient" album. It's less demanding than previous records, finding Rush at her most serene. The energy and volume never passes a certain point. While Dasha's face is front and centre—in a modernist painting sort of way— on the album artwork, her presence in the music is more discreet. Her voice occasionally appears between the music's sparse and microscopic rhythmic structures, with field recordings glued at the edges of warm analogue keys. After the vocal abstraction of "Joy100" and plaintive vocals on "Hans Rivers," we only hear her articulated voice once, on "Dubby Doo," where she speaks in Russian over luminous blankets of sound. Then she disappears.
Most of these tracks feel like they could go on forever, with subtle variations throughout that are both alluring and almost imperceptible. Rush carefully builds and elegantly wraps up each track, making them go as they came with enough care that they don’t overstay. In places, she increase the tempo a little to share her signature rushes. The bass-driven "Hans Rivers" and the broken beat "LoveX" both hint at the exciting and often erratic polyrhythms of her techno output.
On a recent Instagram post, Rush said that "we are surrounded by so much information [and] noises'' that sometimes this kind of music can help you step back from a world of sensory overload, which is clearly the intention behind Contemplating. But the snippets of voice, lyrics and rhythms—far more experimental than Music For Airports-style ambient music enriches the music and enthralls the listener instead of numbing them, making them hungry for more.
Tracklist01. Joy 100
02. Light And Dust
03. Morphingeist
04. Hans Rivers
05. Dubby Doo
06. Summer Photons
07. LoveX
08. Autumn Rivers
09. Trumpets Of Andromeda