pocket*galaxy
I am excited by this gem of an album which fuses drum'n'bass and ambient. Long calm, sound-painting passages alternate perfectly with finest liquid drum'n'bass and the whole album casts a spell on you with this here so compelling combination. Ambient soundscapes can develop here into wonderful drum'n'bass-tunes as slowly as the music and the soul needs it. Epic album!
Favorite track: Thanks For Coming.
Paul Davie
An absolutely stunning album inspired by, amongst other things, my home town of Luton in the 90s. The music is clearly very personal but with a wide appeal. Can't get enough of it, on repeat.
Favorite track: Selective Memory.
Noize_Maka
Stunning. An absolute feel trip from top to bottom. Haven't stopped listening since it dropped and never want to. If you're feeling the burn out and depression from the pandemic, this one is a comfort. Beautiful soundscapes will whisk you out of this horror show for 40 minutes and you'll better for it.
Favorite track: Selective Memory.
The emotive and eponymous project from Pete Rogers, of leading drum & bass outfit Technimatic
Wardown is not so much a musical album as a diary of smeared memory; an account of physical, temporal, familial, musical and sentimental dislocation.
Created by Technimatic’s Pete Rogers, the self-titled Wardown project uses his childhood home of Luton as a psychological fulcrum upon which he balances feelings of loss and yearning for the town, for now-passed family members and for the music of his youth which inextricably bound these things together.
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"It was my own countryside, and I loved it with an intimate feeling, though all its associations were crude and incoherent. I cannot think of it now without a sense of heartache, as if it contained something which I have never quite been able to discover".
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Embodying an ephemeral union with his Lutonian roots, the LP consists of mixtape cuts recorded from his teens, recordings of deceased family, clips from forgotten documentaries about Bedfordshire's rich free party heritage, recordings of brass bands and field recordings of the town-centre. The result is relentlessly beautiful, unashamedly personal and haunted with melancholy.
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"Melodies bring memories,
that linger in my heart and,
makes me think of home and such"
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Self-consciously littered with these recordings and other, deliberately familiar, samples, it would be easy to categorise Wardown as 'Jungle' in the flavour of early Good Looking / Lucky Spin / DeeJay Recs, but this would be to misunderstand the execution. Wardown is a resolutely modernist project, using these samples as memorial touchpoints through which independent narrative voices are introduced to the fabric of the work, layering a hazy, cinematic quality over the already beautifully evocative music.
Wardown is an attempt to capture what the Germans call 'sehnsucht', an "inconsolable longing in the heart for we know not what". Despite a profound sadness hanging over the album it delivers a collection of exquisitely elegant pieces that explore the complexities of physical, emotional and psychological drift.
