Andrew Pekler
Nocturnes, False Dawns And Breakdowns
(~Scape)
Andrew Pekler has been creating shuffly jazz-influenced electronic music for some time now. Under the name of Sad Rockets, he released Transition, an organic/electronic album of tracks he piled together on an eight-track playing real instruments. Influenced by jazz, dub, and other genres, the album showed off his resourcefullness and worked pretty well as a slice of chill. Under his own name, his debut of Station To Station moved through some of the same waters stylistically, but was constructed from loops and pieces of jazz music that he crumpled to fit his vision.
Nocturnes, False Dawns And Breakdowns works in many of the same ways as his first disc, taking short loops of jazz music and layering in electric piano or other melodies to expand into mini-moodscapes. "Here Comes The Night..." opens the release with strums of upright bass and stuttering piano notes as light keyboard melodies playfully bounce along and percussive rolls fill in the rest of the space. After the short intro track, "Arches" again takes some deep upright bass and mingles it with chiming melodies before the track gets caught in a hard drive buffer and spits out the other side even smoother than before, sounding like the theme to a back-alley spy hunt of some sort.
"Wait" works in similar ways, shuffling along with an ever-present simple rhythm while fluttering chimes and some saxophone add the melodic sprinkles. "Stardusting" is almost maddening in its repetition, sounding like a hipster lounge record getting stuck into a lock groove while "In Circles" seems to have almost the opposite problem, fading out just as it sounds like it's about to get going. One of the biggest problems with both of Peklers releases under his own name is that while some tracks feel nicely fleshed-out (like the excellent "False Dawn"), many of the tracks on the release simply feel like looped experiments that either never really take off or simply get stuck in the same worn groove. Fortunately, Pekler is an expert at creating moods, and while some tracks on the release never really go much of anywhere, they're warm and inviting and tend to not span very long running lengths. 14 tracks breeze by in under forty minutes, and while there are some excellent moments, there's not a whole lot that sticks in your head after the release is done spinning.
Rating: 6
