- After an album (the White Denim release Scared) that took his slow-motion, gothed-out house dirges to new extremes of narcotic torpor, Vienna's Tin Man appears on the new L.A. label Absurd Recordings with a positively sprightly acid number, "Nonneo." This time, there are no pitched-down Leonard Cohen vocals or death-gurgle bass notes: from the beginning, the groove is given an upbeat push by clipped, sampled congas (shades of New Order's "The Perfect Kiss") alongside crisp drum machines. Tight delay on the acid bassline, meanwhile, keeps things tumbling forward, while faint but pointed chords egg it all on, expanding the harmonic dimensions of the track. Still, there's an undertone of sadness: what Tin Man takes from acid isn't its squelch, but the innate melancholy in its drooping pitch bends.
Donato Dozzy's remix of "Nonneo" excises the congas and suffuses everything in a layer of echo and fuzz, flipping the original's perky outline into a wearier shape. Towards the end, he unleashes a beautiful sequence of tones, some incidental synthesizer puttering away far away in the distance; they flare up and are gone before you even know it, but the whole mood of the thing has changed, however imperceptibly.
On "Accumulated Acid," Tin Man takes the acid line from "Nonneo" and etherizes it, slowing the tempo to 75 BPM and concentrating on the frequencies that emerge from the lengthened decay time, fleshing out the spectrum with synthesized strings and real-sounding clarinets. It sounds like a combination of vintage Plastikman and Aphex Twin, trippy and bright-eyed all at once, as naive as Boards of Canada on a cloud-watching jaunt. After the anti-gravity anomie of "Space Case," on his last album, it's almost a relief to find out that Tin Man can be such an unrepentant softy.
Tracklist A1 Nonneo
A2 Accumulated Acid
B Nonneo (Donato Dozzy Remix)