Saskia - Tack

  • A sub-aquatic techno highlight from a promising Bristol-via-Tokyo producer's debut album on Accidental Meetings.
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  • Saskia wasted no time finding her place within Bristol's experimental music scene. She arrived from Tokyo in 2022 as an aspiring multidisciplinary artist and, in less than a year of living in Bristol, had already fallen in with the likes of Batu—performing a live set at his En Masse festival—as well as the label Accidental Meetings, contributing a track to their compilation and now releasing her debut LP with them. If you had to, you'd probably call es an ambient album but, like with a lot of music by Bristol's underground artists, it's tricky to brand it with just one style. "Tack" is a case in point. It captures a glimpse of the dancier side of Saskia's music as well as its amorphous, almost sentient streak. "Tack" begins beatlessly, save for a hesitant kick drum that slowly stirs the mix of signal bleeps and bubbly synths into action. It takes about half the track's runtime for the kick to galvanise all the elements into a cohesive whole and push them forward at 144 BPM. It's not dramatic—it's more curious, like a Rroxymore or Beatrice Dillon tune. You feel like you're listening to an idea forming in real time, where the emphasis is on the process more than the end result. That's a sentiment echoed by many of Bristol's experimental artists, and a testament to how well Saskia fits in among them.
RA