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PLEQ - Ballet Mechanic

Format: CD Label & Cat.Number: Basses Frequences BF32 Release Year: 2011 Note: back in stock this hypnotic, extremely subtle ambient album by BARTOSZ DZIADOSZ from Poland - minimal microwave ambience, melancholic & nostalgic - "to travel through crackle, screech, squeak, sizzle and subtle drones."... still to discover, special priced Price (incl. 19% VAT): €8.00 More Info "Preceded by the acclaimed Good Night CD single released last october, Pleq‘s Ballet Mechanic arrives in January on Basses Frequences. Described by Bartosz himself as “(…) the most personal, abstract and intellectual work to date. Ballet Mechanic is never to be repeated.”, this new offering invites the listener to travel through crackle, screech, squeak, sizzle and subtle drones. Melodies also appear throughout the electric atmospheres, as dark and heavy as in First to Fall or That Is Reallly The End, as feathery and celeste as in Good Night (glitch) or Once Upon A Time. Surely one of Pleq’s most accomplished and homogeneous work to date." [label info] https://bassesfrequences.bandcamp.com/album/ballet-mechanic www.bassesfrequences.org Polish electronic producer Bartosz Dziadosz is currently going through a creatively prolific period that’s seen him release no less than four albums under his Pleq alias within the last year, and this latest album on Basses Frequences Ballet Mechanic arrives just a few months on the heels of his preceding Sound Of Rebirth collection for Impulsive Art. While that preceding album saw Dziadosz fashioning subtle, minimalist glitch-IDM atmospheres using just a few repeated elements, by contrast it proves to be a far more rhythmically active beast than this latest collection, which occupies considerably more austere sonic territory. Described by Dziadosz as his most personal and abstract collection to date, the six expansive tracks that make up this 70 minute album see him taking things down into minimalist, glitch-strewn ambience, with the distant murmur of droning noise being offset by the sharp-focus, almost glassy spray of digital detritus that occupies the foreground. Despite the feeling of enveloping isolation that’s soon generated here, it’s notable that Dziadosz is able to maintain a sense of underlying calm and serenity on tracks such as opener ‘Ballet Mechanic’ with its background hum of almost choral-sounding drones drifting beneath a gauzy stream of gently buzzing glitch textures that calls to mind the steady chatter of cicadas, while ‘Good Night (Glitch Version)’ easily offers up this album’s most warm and beatific moment as ebbing harmonic tones lap like waves beneath the dry crackle of digital processing, the slow emergence of treated piano keys adding what’s probably the closest thing to a palpably ‘human’ edge to be found amidst the austere landscapes charted here. Elsewhere though, the ominous ‘First To Fall’ shows that Dziadosz is certainly no stranger to the darkness, as disembodied sounding bleeping tones glide over a vast backdrop of funereal horn drones and what sounds like the steady hum of machinery, before ‘That Is Really The End’ unleashes what’s easily the most unsettling dark-ambient moment to be found here, the distant beeping of instrumentation and slow, pressurised breathing evoking the atmosphere of an operating theatre more than anything else as digital crackles drift against an ebbing backdrop of warped-sounding harmonic bass drones. While Ballet Mechanic perhaps doesn’t cast any really new angles on the established glitch-ambient genre, the six tracks collected here see Dziadosz building a cohesive sense of isolationist atmosphere that’s compelling in its own right. Ballet Mechanic is limited to a run of just 400 copies on CD. Chris Downton