Disrupt – The Recreation Room

Zonedog

Inaugurating the new Zonedog label with a slice of Disrupt ambience, Jan Gleichmar sets the controls for territories beyond both the heavier basslines of his Jahtari releases and the story-led drama of his Omega Station LP, exploring the concept of mood music for a starcraft’s virtual recreation room on this occasion.

The dub inflections come to the fore in the shape of technique more than genre, as found in the sputtering ping-pong pans that throw sound from side to side of the stereo sound picture like passing spacecraft. The ambience of artificial environments is foregrounded in places like “Relax ‘Em Up”, where birdsong merges with drifting motive forces that play gently with the senses, the title playing neatly with the computer simulation as game trope inverted and repurposed to more placid vistas.

Rhythms flicker and pass through, voices are hinted at more than heard coherently, the electronica is gently engaging, sparking images that revolve and return, swishing and floating with a calm detachment from the mundane activities of the long and lonely stretches of (presumably) isolated extraterrestrial existence that The Recreation Room references. In placing the LP within a cosmic library music framework, as Disrupt dubs the form, Jan slips effortlessly into the spaces between Lee Perry‘s afrodelic futurism as conjured at the Black Ark Studio, and Brian Eno‘s hard-science soundtrack Apollo, complete with Star Wars-style cantina lounge grooves on the head-nod-inducing bassline of “Would You Kindly”.

Once again, Disrupt has blended his deep science fiction fandom with the outer limits of electronic texture and mood, hinting both backwards to the nineties-style digital dub environments of the likes of Extremadura while also looking forward with an optimistic eye to how life might be imagined beyond the boundaries of Earth. Where Disrupt will head for next is as open as the void beyond the gravity well, but the voyage is bound to be exhilarating.

-Linus Tossio-