Label: Domino Format: CD,LP
The Third Eye Foundation are now so far away from the guitar-feedback and bare electronic percussion days of their first recordings in method if not sound that they’ve become everything which the fusion of post-Rock and/or Isolationism with Drum & Bass promised. Deep swirls and scrawls of filtered and boosted samples settle across the familiar base of breakbeat tricknology, turning it into something other than dance music (again) along the way.
Little Lost Soul shows that TEF is on a mission into more ambitious places than most D&B producers, even if Matt Elliott hasn’t completely dropped the punning titles such as “I’ve Lost That Loving Feline”. Having said that, those jokes do give a bizarre twist to the atmosphere created by this record, simultaneously enhancing and deflating the sinisterly effective post-Gothic electronic bricolage. Something of the chorally-based soundtracks of Graham Revell is revealed in some pieces, while others take the rinses and rewinds of Drum & Bass and put them through a decidedly crunchy mill. Disturbing shimmers skim around the edges, undermining the relatively upbeat feel Little Lost Soul has compared to, say the Semtex album.
There’s something quite operatic about this record, particularly on the single “What Is It With You” shows, intense mini-dramas played out against a background of noise. Sampled strings and erratic percussion loops skip playfully over the bloated, never mind phat, bass, before getting processed off into the far distance as fragmented memories of rhythm and HipHop illness. Dread like Mephistopheles with a sly smile, Little Lost Soul drifts off appropriately enough into an entirely Lovecraftian dimension of meeping and clawing trails of echo.
-Antron S. Meister-
