Audiopile Review: Portland’s Paul Dickow, aka Strategy, is one of the most underappreciated electronic music artists of our age. We once saw him inexplicably clear a room at the New Forms Festival with a set of mind-bending (but, honestly, not that imposing) abstract dub. Truth is, Dickow’s angle on a range of electronic styles is original enough that weekenders often don’t know how to take it. But the heads recognize a real one when they see it. That’s how Dickow came to become associated with labels like Kranky and Peak Oil, allowing him to amass a sizeable discography of consistently excellent releases. ‘A Cooler World’ comes via Constellation Tatsu and is Strategy music at its chilliest and most heavenly. Hallucinatorily phasing synth pads have plenty of room to work their magic in this spacious ambient set. The mood is unhurried and utopian, and Dickow’s individual spin keeps proceedings fresh and intriguing. This is deep (and deeply satisfying) material, and yet there’s almost nothing to it.

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Portlander Paul Dickow, as Strategy, presents his latest album— A Cooler World. Fascinated by the unfamiliar limitations and inherent playability of a hand-me-down, 1989 model sampling keyboard, he played these pieces by hand, mostly abandoning the sequencer driven framework of sampling based music; he plays the sampler here the way a guitarist approaches the guitar. A Cooler World is a deep dive into glacial, pensive soundscapes that navigate the boundaries between experimental, ambient, and dance music. The pieces unfold with deliberate intention, expressed in a sound vocabulary that originates in the futurism of ambient techno, yet they open to the serendipitous outcomes of his instrumental experimentation. One of his few albums that fully commits to ambience, with this new album, everything is slowed down, gesturing towards stillness, and transformed into something otherworldly under a blanket of snow. Paul has released records as Strategy on Peak Oil, Kranky, and so many others. Prolific and motivated, Paul crafts his music to fill unanswered musical riddles and unexplored rabbit holes he discovers in his capacities as experimenter, record collector, and DJ.