By: “Chad
Ben Chatwin | website | facebook | twitter | bandcamp | soundcloud |
Released on July 29, 2016 via Ba Da Bing Records
Heat & Entropy is an aptly named warm and chaotic ejaculate of excellent electronic music with a beautifully psychedelic squid tentacle sack adorning the cover. Going into it blind you may get caught off-guard by the medieval music box-esque chimes and bells that add a mystical element to the album baffling the brain with a temporal question mark from the off-set taking retro to its logical conclusion whilst sailing towards the future through dense synth waves. Building on this Gravitational Bodies blends oblique obelisks of spiralling dystopia into a calm revisiting the music box-esque mallets and joyful eruptions to propel the track into a violent euphoria.
Whilst the first two tracks almost blend into one compliment, Standing Waves ventures out into wider ground introducing a new atmosphere into the album with a cinematic sounding tension being clearly on display in the tense climax of the track.
It’s interesting how Chatwin takes the more blockbuster/action movie sound into what is perhaps a more Vangelis/Blade Runner direction almost utilising popular culture as a sequencing device to transition into Phantom Lights. It works magnificently well and the result is fucking glorious. Luminescent pads and shooting star keys light up the track whilst menacing tones lurk like lamprey shadows stalking beneath the surface. Going even further into darker lands Oscillation spews colossal bellows of ominous pads and diseased synths to twist melodies into madness. A thousand gentle screams glisten like wet leaves whilst a blistering brass tone lightly perforates the centre of the mix adding to the sinister iridescence of the album as a whole.
The eeriness continues into The Kraken; a dark ambient track boasting some stunning strings and beautiful percussion amidst a haze of somber pads and twinkly oscillating synths. The introduction uses hypnotic pads panning intensely to create the effect of being submerged lower and lower; a thousand fathoms into the deep. The main melody itself evocative of a submarine chirp; the siren beckoning out adding definition to the imposing mythological atmosphere being composed. Exploding at its climax the atmosphere transforms from fantasy to fatality as Chatwin throws us into a boss fight versus the kraken in an intense crescendo.
Sounds that seem to seep through the walls; Surface Tension permeates melancholy though every textural fibre of its being almost collapsing under the weight of itself as it boils over. A despondent dirge of sawtoothed organs and blades of piano striking like hammers against iron. A twinkling melody whistling like falling glass. A bleak actualisation of sorrow; a lucid dream or an opaque memory.
The album is brought to a close in a pairing of heavily instrumented pieces dusting off the ashes of its electronic casket to once again venture out beyond; Euclidean Plane almost feels like an awakening as though Chatwin has thrown the listener off a cliff in the middle of the album and the scream has carried us to the point of waking up soaked in sweat. The world feels different, the routine feels different; informed by the chaos within everything the prosaic becomes estranged as a reality once taken as a given is questioned through a new perspective. Contemplatively exploring the piano and drifting the guitar whilst the wild roaming rhythm guitar gallops with each pluck; the songs introspection is built in the sense of disorientation in every layer of the track. Corpseways drifts seamlessly in, dragging the listener through a haze forged in the debris of Heat & Entropy; each element of the album re-surfacing to emphasise the overall tone of the release.
