BRENDON MOELLER レコード& CD

Review: Esteemed musical chameleon Brendon Moeller, renowned for his highly respected work in deep ambient, dub techno and myriad variations on such themes - turns his hand to 170 for Samurai Music. Centring on the iconic tempo as a key formal constraint - one that binds and defines drum & bass and halftime at its very core - Moeller is nonetheless able to articulate many new stylistic horizons with 'Vacuum'. As if to resist the banalities of content that plague drum & bass - overwrought amens, lasery one-shots, ragga voice echoes, you name it - Moeller instead leans into a purely formal atmospheric exercise, with 'Can't Run Away', 'Perspective' and 'Agitate' forgetting the concatenative associations of 'drum & bass' (TM) and instead fleshing out the less fetishistic contours of the metre, albeit also keeping up a squarely moody aura throughout.