ALBUM REVIEWS

David Wright & Ian Boddy SHIFTING SANDS AD MUSIC 26.9.09 @www.vanguard-online.co.uk If you’ve heard anything from this label before, you’ll not be surprised to hear that this album opens quietly with a building swell of sound, breaking into a slow but loping robotic pulse as washes of synth rise and fall. Fragments of detail colour things, from lyric melody lines to glittering sonic sparkles. This is probably more like Tangerine Dream than anything I’ve heard in a while. It’s all produced on synths, even the lines that sound like the path a lead guitar would make. And those paths are noodley explorations of dream-space. Ian Boddy and David Wright are both well known, insofar as anyone in the UK electronic scene outside of dance music can be called well-known. David runs the AD Music label and has numerous releases to his name, whilst walrus-whiskered Boddy played recently with Wright and the fabulously monikered Klaus “Cosmic” Hoffman at Derby’s electronic music festival. The guitar there added another layer but this is richly textured in itself. Four long tracks and a six-minute ‘filler’ set of on sequencer journeys of the mind; rhythmic but relaxed – a set to drift away on. The listener can become oblivious to the passing of time – not necessarily focussing hard on the music (it has a habit of coming into focus then floating out of sharpness for a while) but receiving it by way of an aural massage; a therapy of the lugholes. Just at the end, they throw in a perkier short track for a “one, two, three and you’re back in the room” effect, leaving you feeling pleasantly chilled. This is never going to be fashionable but it meets the needs of moods and provides a context for astral ponderings. Or a nap. It’s all down to the contours of your inner cranium. Ross McGibbon www.admusiconline.com Email Links & Comments to the editor Check the latest album releases