Analogie van de Dageraad
Have we reached peak ElektronMusikStudion? The famous Stockholm studios have became a veritable place of pilgrimage in these modular times, with the Buchla 200 and Serge Synthesizer Systems shaping the sound of so many releases. Of course this is no guarantee of quality, it’s not how vintage it is, it’s how you use it.
Belgian sound artist DSR Lines, produced his latest Analogie van de Dageraad at EMS during live sessions captured over the first week of October 2014 with the results being mixed and compiled in Antwerpen. As with his previous work III-II recorded at Rotterdam’s CEM/Worm studio, DRS Lines’ main focus seems to be on rhythm and melody. Both works share a similar playful outlook, with Analogie van de Dageraad being an overall more poised and calibrated affair than the more ebullient III-II. The careful editing job has produced a balanced amalgam of pulsating tones gifted with a light touch that never slips into cheesy fluffyness or sterile experimentation. Each track is allowed to breathe and to develop its own trajectory always sustained by a melodic thread that switches from pensive to joyful with seamless ease.
Other material from the same residency at EMS found a home in DSR Lines’ third release of 2015, Teller, which also collates earlier tracks recorded with Vermona Per4mer mkII and Eurorack at ll150, and Eurorack, Keys and Arp 2500 at CEM. Teller feels more like a compilation of offshoots and B-sides, a strange concoction of different possibilities being explored. Analogie van de Dageraad, though, is clear proof that DSR Lines is confident enough to be able to converse with an impressive degree of fluency within different musical idioms.
Originally released on tape by the ever excellent Jj Funhouse, home to no frills analog trippyness dressed in a zine style overcoat, Analogie van de Dageraad is out on vinyl on Ultra Eczema on the 1st of February with new artwork by label’s head honcho Dennis Tyfus.
DRS Lines is playing at Café OTO, London, on the 17th of February as part of an Ultra Eczema label night together with Miaux and Dennis Tyfus himself in his Vom Grill guise.