Clever ambient noise
The ambient electro swirls of Dextro’s latest offering “Winded” hook you in from the first minute. Dextro is the alias of Scottish musician Ewan Mackenzie, who also drums with Experimental/Sludge/Post-rock band Snowblood so his influences are varied and interesting and this can be heard in this record very clearly.
Like all good ambient rides this is a multi-layered soundscape where sampled voices sit with washes of thrumming sound and pass through lovely melodies; take the beautiful ‘The Pacifist’ for example, it has live drumming and guitars over twinkling piano played in a different key and is full of echoes. The effect is somewhere between Godspeed You! Black Emperor and The Orb, a kind of experimental, ambient, electro, post-rock; if you want to go for a categorisation take your pick. Whatever the genre, it’s a fluid, introspective sound and the live instruments make it easier to connect to and give it so much more depth than it would have, had it been all loops, samples and synths.
‘Ring Cycle’ is an impressive piece of shifting, jerky electro at the beginning, with tweeting birds, and synths which soon breaks into solid drumming, guitar echoes, interesting almost hip hop beats and almost heard vocal noises punctuating the mix. This is typical of a record that tries to do so much and succeeds, in not only producing a sound that mixes the atmospheric elements of both ambient/electro and sweeping, skin tingling post-rock like Mogwai/Godspeed... and Rothko but creating a cohesive and absorbing listening experience that should appeal to fans of both ends of the spectrum.