Saturday, November 29, 2008

Triage, A New Album from DJ Olive


out now on label Room 40

DJ Olive
Triage
By Dimitri Nasrallah

DJ Olive’s Gregor Asch originally emerged out of the same Crooklyn Dub Consortium scene that typified the illbient period of bass-centric frequencies during the ’90s, coming up with very early emissions from the likes of the Bug, Spectre, and bass-orientalists like We and Badawi. He’s since moved down the two parallel paths that forged illbient, preferring to separate his records into straight-out break-beat experiments via labels like the Agriculture or textbook ambient compositions, which have emerged with increasing regularity via Australian label Room 40. Triage follows 2006’s Sleep and constitutes another nuanced edition into the warm drones that wouldn’t be out of place on a Stars of the Lid album. Like SOTL, Triage’s hour-long evolution is intended as a soundtrack for sleep, and so the sounds that emerge in the wash of warm Moog and turntable samples, not to mention occasional light percussion and a trumpet that brings to mind Miles Davis’s In a Silent Way, never interrupt the fall backwards into unconsciousness so much as accentuate it. True to its promise, this album really does send its listeners tumbling softly into dreams. (Room 40)

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