Artist: Access to Arasaka
Album: Oppidan
Year: 2009
Label: Tympanik Audio / Spectral Liquid
Genre: IDM, Ambient, Downtempo
Website: http://accesstoarasaka.com
Oppidan is a fun new glitchy / downtempo-ambient album, joint-released on Tympanik Audio and Spectraliquid. A lot of people like to say that Access to Arasaka is the new Gridlock, or perhaps the successor to their dynasty. Well, I have to disagree about the "new gridlock", but AoA is a very worthwhile project nonetheless.
If you have heard AoA's older releases (which are free to DL, so you really should hear them), than you will know exactly what you are getting into. Oppidan sounds almost exactly like his older works; the sporadic, seemingly random, glitchy beats; the awesome, sparse, and distant melodies; and the epic sci-fi atmospheres. It's all very cool sounding, but on this record, more than ever before, stuff feels simply too random. There is very little cohesion between elements, and the beats seem to be more directionless than not. Almost too much random glitchiness works against the flow of the songs. This is not always the case of course, but I find myself thinking that a lot during the course of this album. I like the :Port EP more than this one because the elements work together to create songs with a singular direction and feeling. Oppidan has better production and slightly better sound design than previous works, but in general it feels like more of the same...which is not particuarly bad because this is a great style of which there is too little in the music world.
Anyway, despite the flaws I mention above, this is still an awesome album because there are so few people doing this type of thing, and doing it this well. The production and sound design is solid, as always. The pads are atmospheric and the melodies are gripping and beautiful. If you like Gridlock-type melodic ambient/idm and really glitchy stuff and the combination of the two sounds like a good idea, than you should check this out. Definitely make sure to grab his older free stuff, from illphabetik netlabel and/or his website.
overall: 7.5/10
4 comments:
Oh, yeah! This is awesome album. Check out my interview with artist http://www.arrhythmiasound.com/2009/08/interview-access-to-arasaka.html
This is awesome. Where are the earlier records available for download? I can't find any.
Oh...if you haven't already, go visit his web site, it's an IT geeks dream.
He used to have the links on his website, in the code somewhere. You can also check the netlabels they were released on...illphabetik released a couple.
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