Statiqbloom
Winter
self-released
The turn Fade Kainer’s longstanding industrial project Statiqbloom made into TBM with 2022’s Threat was a sharp one, and new LP Winter is just as abrupt a shift. Made up primarily of ambient washes and passing drifts of feedback, Winter feels like a full exploration of sounds which were present in the corners of the earliest Statiqbloom work, but never given this much focus. While not totally bereft of beats and vocals, tracks like “Bone White”, with its combo of burbling power electronics and dark ambient tides, set the tone for a slow passage through bleak, snowy drifts and slushy fens. The titular theme makes for good connective tissue between the most ambient tracks and the midtempo pulse of “In The Marrow Of Cold” (a fitting title for a track evoking classic Cold Meat Industry fare). On both the titular opener and the closing “Silver Sews The Sky Shut”, overdriven drones act as a slow, lulling undertow into the maw of the void. Pieces like these almost feel like a reevaluation of the most heavily psychedelic of Statiqbloom’s preceding records, with their rhythmic skeletons stripped away and allowing the pure tone and timbre of Kainer’s sound design to envelop you.
dormnt
Egodeath
self-released
Vancouver producer Anthony McGillivray’s new EP under the auspices of the dormnt project finds a balance between their previous work in technoid project Urusai, and the more ambient and textural sounds they’ve been exploring in recent years. Tracks like “Surge Capacity” are driven by the rhythm of the drum programming, but with the impact of the percussion cushioned through careful filtering and mixing, keeping the momentum and push forward through the song’s smokey pads intact while not dispersing the atmosphere they provide. Alternately, “Unrest” leaves the drums crunchy and agile, but adds tonal weight to the synths that swirl around them, taking on a brassy seasick tone, made all the more intense by the subtle synthlines that underpin its arrangement. Where the title track that closes out the EP iterates on both of those approaches by flipping the focus from cloudy bells and wavy pools of reverb that spread across the stereo spectrum, the EP’s most striking moment is Devoid, where trance-style gating plays directly against the kicks, and washy pads emerge like ripples from the synths carrying the track’s melody, suggesting a vast space, and then filling it with fog.
