Label: City Slang (Europe)/Mute (North America) Format: CDS,12″
The Pantone EP brings together a selection of tracks originally aired on To Rococo Rot and I-Sound’s Music Is A Hungry Ghost album, here revised in light of live performance. “Pantone (Red)” whirrs out from an opening skim across the glitchscape into a tinkly melody, all trailed echoes of brightly-sparking electronics and the characteristic TRR bass glide. The synthetic strings swell, the melody hums beatiful thoughts to itself, and the chirrup of cyclical hiss and spinning tops makes drowsy clouds waft by into delicate decay. The Trance Of Travel (Gets)” brings the Funk on in, as hesitant synthetic notes make their statement of intent to the beat of steam-propelled drum machinery and the sound of layered delay-looped percussion samples. It’s on this track that I-Sound’s electronic trickery first starts to make itself heard in depth on the EP, counterpointing the smooth bass ride with shimeers of digital offcuts and smartly-clipped glitch snippets and squelches.
“Brett Zwei” is a reworking of Track 2 of the Kölner Brett album, bringing up the bass into a Dub chillout as it walks across the crisp drum sounds while I-Sound’s electronics infect the acoustic guitar melody with digital birdsong. The next surprise is “I Wanted To meet Him”, which rollicks around a Dancehall rhythm paired with the characteristic To Rococo Rot liquidity, creating a whole new ambient Ragga sound on an emergent bassline of generous warmth. “Fishermen Dressed Like Joseph Beuys” combines meandering sample fragments with equally distracted guitar strums and insectoid glimmers for a pastoral fade to minimalist calm concluding a finely diverse EP with a touch of quietly clever niceness
-Antron S. Meister-
