Eblake
Limit
[Deluxe]
Rating: 6.8
One word that's been cropping up lately when people talk about electronic
music is "grid." It's been suggested that music that depends on sequencing
technology is somehow limited because it lacks a human quality. MIDI clocks
keep perfect time, and our internal ones do not. When sounds are strung up
in patterns using such ridged geometry, perhaps they begin to sound a bit
alike.
This phenomenon could have something to do with rising interest in glitch--
the sound of machines making mistakes. It's interesting, though, that so much
music in this vein focuses on distortion of the individual sounds and not the
rhythm. Part of this probably has to do with artists coming at the music from
the world of minimal techno, where the nonstop pulse is valued above all.
Repetition is one of the central elements of Seattlite E. Blake Davis' debut
album, Limit. As with musicians like Kit Clayton and Sutekh, Eblake
latches on to the relentlessly skeletal beats that ping-ponged their way
from Detroit to Berlin and back over to America's west coast, borrowing
some production tricks from Jamaican dub along the way.
But where Clayton and Sutekh have also latched onto the surface noise
aesthetic pioneered by Pole, Eblake prefers a more traditional sound palate.
These loops have all the repetition of minimal techno, but the samples come
from guitars, pianos and more "classic" sounding synth patches. Upon first
listen, Limit reminded me a lot of Burger/Ink's Las Vegas in
the way guitar patterns were chopped into tiny units and looped incessantly.
"I Am the VJ," in particular, seems inspired by that Cologne offshoot.
In some respects, this sound/structure combination is problematic. Typically,
music so locked into grids offers some small, barely perceptible changes to
reward the careful listener. There's no such remuneration for those
scrutinizing Limit. When the various loops fold in, they either stay
put or disappear, and the gradual modulations are missed.
Fortunately for Eblake, though, he knows how to get the most out of his loops.
It helps that there's a steady, rolling mood throughout the record. The stable
house kick and upstroke high-hat make appearances on most tracks, and the
riffs are generally even a bit catchy. "Bandol" makes good use of some woozy
accordion samples, and "La Luz" is populated with sparkling ambient gurgles
and piano samples that seem to drift from somewhere beyond Ultraworld.
Is Limit fenced in by the grid it seems composed on? Perhaps, yes.
But I can hear this album another way, as a uniform train of sound that
steams gradually by. And from that vantage point, Limit looks good.
-Mark Richard-San