home > browse > cd-feature > view article

CD Feature/ Bvdub: "Return to Tonglu"

  Tobias

Brock Van Wey knows his way around the fields of crisply pumping electronica and cinema verite ambience - he subjects their razar lines and embryonic harmonies to a strong salting of dub and the mystery of his treacle-thick production, infusing their flow with a heady tension and disaffected beauty that together oust the mind sagging in its automatisms.

None of it consciously marches against expectation, and Wey never appears keen to puncture his continuum with discontinuities, but the ethereal stomp and shaking gaseous shapes of riveting forward motion deepen to the point where these expansive environments demonstrate real power for the integration of thoughts and memories. The title track becomes a eulogized space through its shimmying tom tick rhythms, flitting mini-melodies and subtly modulating percussion revolving in counterpoint. The whole thing then worms into a more top-heavy arrangement with "Always On The Outside", a grinding beat and monolithic bass wobble shoot up into a towering structure, dwarfing the descending textures.

Wey pulls apart and swabs down the final two compositions with judicious amounts of reverb and a steady, melancholic pace. These pieces, particularly the album closer, "It's Too Late", unfurl beats and textures in a space where time and origins mean nothing, where everything reverberates like water against the edges of a vase, and one can linger lovingly on the details as they slip away as unassumingly as they enter. Such ominous moments make Return to Tonglu something more than a skillful bit of dub techno; they make it something poetically useful, something inimitably personal.

By Max Schaefer

Homepage: Bvdub
Homepage: Quietus Recordings