Tuesday, April 17, 2012

CHLLNGR Datters Along


Danish producer CHLLNGR takes a different approach to making electronic music and his use of vowels. While he apparently sees no use for the bedrock of the English language, he does find a use for sparse synthesized washes of sound and uses them copious amounts. His latest EP Datter is an atmospheric work of electronic sketches, gurgles, and crackles. Pop music this is not, but rather the soundtrack to the crazy dreams of a Dane living in Sacramento, California.

Datter isn't necessarily musical in a traditional sense, rather, its mood music that haunts your soul. This is a record where minimal beats, if any at all, sidle next to detached voices that meander in an out of the songs as if they were ghosts. It's weird and strange stuff that sounds like the whole thing was recorded in a dark cave twenty miles underground. Dubbed out, tripped out, and ambient this is sort of record that would give Brian Eno or Bill Laswell nightmares. In fact Datter sounds like it could be Eno's and Laswell's personal visions of hell; a series of stark echoic sounds that wander the earth searching for something to belong to.

Imaginative and very unusual, CHLLNGR has created the stuff of psychotherapy and he didn't even need a vowel or a rhythm to do it. Cool.

1 comment: