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There’s more than meets the eye on Richard D. James’ first new EP in five years, a slim collection of percussive bruisers with a woozy, inscrutable mood.

For his first major output in half a decade, Blackbox Life Recorder appears a little thin at just four tracks long, especially since one of those, “Blackbox Life Recorder 22 [Parallax Mix],” is an alternate take. It’s more than just a question of quantity. There was a clear sense of purpose to other recent EPs of new material: Cheetah was an egghead’s love letter to a notoriously arcane synthesizer, Collapse a tour de force of drum programming. But it’s hard to find a comparable organizing principle for this one.

In general, these tracks are big, bruising, and percussion-forward. Whatever gear he’s used this time—internet sleuths have noted that the sleeve of the new EP features graphics from the Sequentix Cirklon, a hardware sequencer that he cited in two Cheetah titles and a previous interview—the drums have unusual oomph. He leans heavily on vintage-sounding drum machines: dampened snares, scratchy hi-hats, flammy toms, a rimshot worthy of Prince. His programming is as knotty as ever, but it’s the treatment of his drums that stands out. On “zin2 test5” and “in a room7 F760,” the hits are dry and unvarnished, as though recorded in a studio lined with blankets. “Blackbox Life Recorder 21f” is more complex: Some beats are muffled, others trail off into shimmery reverb tails. One kit simultaneously seems to occupy two very different positions in space, to subtly dizzying effect.

What the tracks share, mainly, is a certain inscrutable mood. The synths are woozy and watery, soaked in rapid-fire vibrato and prodded by occasional tritones. “Blackbox Life Recorder 21f” boasts a lovely melody that wends its way through the background, a beguiling ghost in glowing robes. In “zin2 test5,” softly sighing chords temper the surly bassline and nervous drum fills. And “in a room7 F760” starts with the kind of melancholy chiming synth lead that James canonized with Selected Ambient Works 85-92, then blows everything wide open: weird stereo panning, flayed hi-hats, “I need more cowbell” levels of cowbell. No matter how hectic the going gets, he suffuses it in miasmatic synths that sound like a much sadder version of New Order’s Power, Corruption and Lies. If that weren’t affecting enough, “Blackbox Life Recorder 22 [Parallax Mix]” swaps out beefier drum sounds for hissing, rollicking cymbals in a classic “Xtal”/“Pulsewidth” vein, playing up the song’s spooky, phantasmal properties. — (via Pitchfork)

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After the five year-hiatus following 2018's Collapse EP, Richard D. James returned with augmented reality—the technology that's primed to replace the mobile phone as our primary interface for digital content—to tease a new EP. Whether it's the gear he builds himself or his still mind-blowing comeback album Syro, it's typical of James to re-emerge in the present bearing gifts from the future. On Blackbox Life Recorder 21f / In A Room7 F760, he opts for more of a retrospective turn, unifying his '90s and '10s work under kinetic, obsessively processed drum patterns and melancholy chord sequences. Instead of attempting to reinvent the wheel, he refines and extends his legacy, preserving the familiar while hearkening back to the uncanny moods that shroud his best ambient-leaning works. — (via Resident Advisor )

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Label: Warp Records 
Format: Vinyl, 12", 45 RPM, EP
Released: 2023
Genre: Electronic
Style: IDM, Acid, Glitch

File under: Electronic / Leftfield
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