Body Of Water
Label: Hotham Sound
Genre: Electronic, Highlights
$12.99
Audiopile Review: Following up the junkyard IDM wobble of MIDI Janitor’s recent cassette, Hotham dish up their second release for Playback Head, the Brazilian-born/Vancouver-based artist, representing the imprint’s aesthetic of analog-centric home-fi electronica to an absolute tee. That sublimated vision of the natural world realized through a bedroom of knotted electronics and gear is one we’ll always be suckers for, and Playback Head’s teaming of crackling nocturnal insects and the all-consuming wash of waterways with his particularly warbled tones and hypnotic percussion are especially inviting. “South Beach” officially launches the cassette with the warm patter a woozy drum machine, crystalline keys, and kraut-y guitar glides, the waves lapping at the edge of the breezy electronics. Then there’s the Equatorial heat-rinsed chiming lift of “Tropic of Capricorn”, leant a shapely groove with Balearic guitar, or the curtain closing title track, a gooshing blend of hissy tape, smeared tones and percolating water samples filtered underneath, keeping it all afloat. Another wistful transmission of analog bliss from Hotham Sound, who just can’t seem to miss these days. Edition of 70, sold out at the source.
On his second album for Hotham Sound, Vancouver-by-way-of Brazil artist Alexandre Klinke expands the lo-fi analog tape experimentation last heard on 2021’s ‘First Sounds’ into a fully developed sound world all his own. Acoustic instruments, children’s toys, field recordings, electronic textures, and the artist’s trademark tape manipulations draw us immediately in, but the glue holding it all together is Klinke’s deep and understated musicality, the product of years of work as a player of jazz and Brazilian folk. In true Hotham Sound fashion, the theme of the album is water; a place of comfort, grief, memory, and connection to the primordial past. Exploring this theme, the eleven tracks slip effortlessly between longitudes, evoking both tropical beaches and northern inlets, glittering tide pools and meandering rivers. On ‘Tropic of Capricorn’ and album standout ‘South Beach,’ bass, guitar and rhythm-box invite the listener into a lagoon of immense calm and reflection, while tracks like ‘Amphibian’ and ‘Memory Island’ are murkier in tone, with field recordings of animal life evoking darker estuaries of the mind. On the title track, a series of bright, yearning tones sink slowly into an ocean of magnetic tape distortion, eventually becoming indistinguishable from the sound of water itself.