Two Orb Reel by Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe

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2017 | Dance | Electronic

The modular maestro mounts his most varied solo release to date with the sci-fi knots and whorls of Two Orb Reel for the More Than Human label, who’ve previously yielded ace LPs from Pye Corner Audio and Dieter Moebius.

Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe follows up his Kulthan pearl for Latency (go check this one, we can’t get enough of it!) with an absorbingly wistful and coolly suggestive sound inside, knitting raw electricity into a series of impeccably refined and chamber-considered vignettes that leave lots to the imagination.

Blessed with a sense of rhythmic cadence and controlled ballistics that sets his music apart from the now swelling modular milieu, Robert Lowe coaxes out his machines’ spirits and voices with the touch of a industrial era illusionist who has just realised how to spellbind crowds with the “magic” of electricity, enabling him to soundtrack, as the label puts it, “emotions of wonder, fear and transcendence.” OK, we’re not wide eyed Victorians with pagan beliefs in the supernatural (well, then again…), but records like this one certainly do challenge the mundane logic of any more skeptical listeners as to the existence of something “other” when it comes to electronic music.

In 14 parts ranging from sub 1-minute mysteries to more expansive tracts of uniquely metered plong offset with curdled melodic and harmonic developments, the allure, as with much of Lowe’s music, lies in the way he naturally bridges those aspects so that everything moves in viscous union to extrude your head through the maze. And in the classic sense of African rhythmelodic musics, there are no ‘tricks’ or ‘drops’ - effectively spectacles - to speak of, instead placing focus on the journey or the ‘trek’ and insisting the listener is both physically and mentally rolled around inside their structures, fluidly engaging one’s proprioceptions in a way that bypasses or at least smudges what are putatively western-rooted compositional conventions.

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Label

More Than Human

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dance electronic