When I was growing up there was this sort of obsession with fast food. McDonalds were springing up everywhere, and if you had to wait for longer than ten minutes for anything at all there was something going wrong and you had very right to complain to the rafters about it. These day of course, there’s this move back way from fast foods and toward this slow cooking sort of thing, where it takes longer, but due to the effort and care taken and the ingredients used, it meant it was tastier, more fulfilling, better I suppose.
Bristol producer A Sagittariun is like the musical equivalent of slow cooking. Listening to his album dream ritual, out on Elastic Dreams on November 23rd (ironically the first day of Sagittarius on the calendar) the things that draw you in are these slow moving, evolving tracks, that move slowly but rarely stay the same, and move between icy and warm beauty.
A Sagittariun has proved with his various eps (seven in all since 2011) that he can move within the various styles of electronic music with ease, and that is clear again with this album. From the first track, the warm, rippling electronica of Sundial, which grows and twists and turns throughout to the last, Network Restoration, which has this almost deep house feel, albeit within the boundaries of techno, A Sagittariun shows he has the tools to hop genres. So although this plenty of the classic techno about the record, in particular V4641 Sgr, A Lucid Dream, the funky Year of the Ox and the shimmering delight that is The South Note, theres also plenty more. crystallisation is this almost static ambient piece at the beginning but is lit up with Skip McDonalds looping guitar, while Conquering Lions and Trine both have this strong breakbeat feel about them. The Age of Sin has definite Industrial ideas contained within it, as does the more in your face Seven Locks (in dub), but its the cascading electronica of The Wind has no time where A Sagittariun is at his most inventive and beautiful.
Like the slow cooking, A Sagittariun has used care, effort and used (albeit musical) the right ingredients to make something that is tastier, more fulfilling and definitely better than quite a few electronic albums out there.
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