Saturday, August 15, 2009

yeah, Zone, it's a perfectly pleasant little tune, and i expect it does fine on a big system (especially if sandwiched between two less boring tracks)... i think my irritation with "hmpfph" is to do with the way it gestures at musicality without actually delivering it... the diva loop: nothing's really done with it, stays the same pretty much all the way through... the chords are dull,the synth-key textures are content to signify "warm" and "lush"... that's why it reminds me of the lesser lights of that ambient-jungle moment, like some of the nice-enough-but-not-major things Moving Shadow put out in between the anthems and the giant steps forward...

see there's nothing wrong with "warm" and "lush" per se... but if you're going to do "musical", go the whole hog, a la MJ Cole "Sincere" or Adam F "Circles": tunes that build and grow and peak, that go through many changes... the minimalism of "huff gnomo" is not the stripped down, reduction-as-distillation/intensification sort (a la Robert Hood et al), but the minimal of undeveloped, not fully realised, didn't finish the job...