- Claude VonStroke being...subtle? It's true. "Aundy" and "Storm on Lake Saint Claire" represent the first bow from the San Fran producer from his upcoming album, and they're like little you've heard from him before. "Aundy," which closed out VonStroke's excellent Fabric mix, is the prototypical album closer. It takes its main melodic meat from a twinkling digital synth line with enough gloomy fake strings to satisfy the depressive in your family before building up to the classic VonStroke bump. Except it bumps and backs off, and builds again, declining to take you by the shirt collar and throw you down on the ground ala most of his previous work under the CVS name.
"Storm on Lake Saint Claire" is possibly even more mannered, using thunder and a quick-footed off-beat to wring every bit of drama out of the track he can. It's a slow build, taking about four minutes to get to the descending synth climax, but it helps to cement the idea that this track is a reference to his drum & bass past, a genre full of extended intros and outros that sometimes were far more interesting than the actual tracks themselves. (That VonStroke lets the song play for a minute past its "end" with only the noise of rain and nature is no accident.) It's hard to imagine that the eventual full-length will have anything else like these two, but Aundy bodes well for its versatility. CVS seems to understand that rewriting "Who's Afraid of Detroit?" won't make him too many new fans, and for that we can all be thankful.
TracklistA Aundy
B Storm On Lake Saint Claire