The first line of the Fluttery Release page for this record is "Nadav Cohen is an ambient music composer from Melbourne, Australia born in 1999."
Good Gravy. This person was barely born in the last century, and here they are releasing interesting music. Sigh... as long as Mr. Cohen stays offa my lawn, i am okay with it...
But this is a good ambient release. Cohen has a fascinating style that blends IDMish skittering sounds with an almost hip-hop looping beat combined with strings and synths that wash in layers. He has absorbed Autechre and DJ Shadow and Boards of Canada and post-rock, and fused them all into a style that comes across as greater than the sum of its parts.
This is a short EP: four tracks that are barely over three minutes each. That is brief for the ambient genre, where songs can take 10 minutes just to make a point.
Welcome Home fades in, the music slowly coming into focus from silence, a faint piano tinkling, then some light strings. The song just floats along, eventually fading into Ending the Storm, where lush synths wash in. A skittering drum machine beat wanders in, with synths and a tinkling melody that sounds like a guitar. The effect of this tune is very Lights Out Asia, or Port-Royal.
Cohen goes more electronic that post-rock on Soft Touch. The beat here is slightly mangled, just a distorted hit that skips along like old school hip-hop. Over this he plays a nice keyboard melody. This a lovely little tune.
And then Lacuna ends the EP with a faint keyboard tinkling, just a sparse sprinkling of sound, slowly fading out.
This is a very lovely EP, but over too fast. I get it that this is Mr. Cohen's debut, his "proof of concept" for making music. Well, i would say that it is successful and i look forward to hearing more. |
