An album released by the label that is synonumous with quality, both in music and artwork: Expanding Records. After starting releasing the second single series and introducing new artists on their label, that is, the artist Praveen and his debut evs3:03, Expanding present yet another new artist to their label: Holkham. However, Holkham has extensive previous experience of recording music and is vividly interested in the structural aspects of sound. Both these pieces of information comes across very clearly on “Komatta Saru”, which is his debut album on Expanding. It’s a strikingly well-balanced and well-produced album, with definitive rhythmic qualities. Starting off with the soundscapes of “Holkham” serving as a perfect intro, and it is followed by “The Conversation” analogally tainted beats and strong melody. You could say that the album contains and is built by contrasting pairs, structure is confronted with formlessness acting as short interludes and tie the album’s tracks together. “Bose Bose” is a kind monster of a song, heartbreaking strings flows over heavy drums and in comes the right amount of distortion sounding as a gentle rain, digital rain that is. “Bose Bose” is clearly among my faviourites on this fine album. Moving on to “Juv3_1” that introduces some dubbier aspects to the album. No dub e or any other kind can exist without bass and there must be a lot of it too. “Juv3_1” is naturally not an exception and builds slowly adding element after element creating a really nice e-dub track. “Mice” has a lovely intro and beatless bliss with washes of carefully selected sonds slowly increasing in intensity. Top-class! “Tam” lovely subbass in this epic track, the played bassline is fused with featherlight percussion and they simply rolls along. The second layer of percussions is added and it keeps on building and building, in order to be deconstructed in the end. It’s excellent and easily one of this year’s best tracks “Scrophularia” goes for brute force and has got big drums the added glitch and premium crisp brokendness create a compelling track. It too is among the favourites. The album is concluded by an array of beautiful compositions that seem to be flowing into each other seamlessly creating the impressive outro that the album deserves. On “Komatta Saru” Holkham succeeds in making an album that sounds like it was specifically made for Expanding without sounding as anything previously released. It’s easy to see why Holkham was selected to release an album, because it’s a perfect macth if I ever saw one! Expanding’s on track.
electronic desert ≡ revisited + extended