MULTICAST DYNAMICS - Scape

Reissued by Denovali just a year after its original release, on the back of the artist's record-breaking signing that led to the new (and excellent) “Aquatic System”, “Scape” is the debut studio album by Dutch producer and musician Samuel Van Dijk under the moniker Multicast Dynamics. It's a project born out of the artist's previous experiences, capable of ranging sonically from the artiest deep techno to drone, with an ever-growing interest in sound art.

That very shift is documented on this short album, which is essentially a forerunner - still raw but already thoroughly convincing - of the research that would come to define his later work. Having decisively (if somewhat hastily) washed away his techno past, Van Dijk here inaugurates the era of fastidious sound design and that interest in reworking field recordings that would be revisited with greater awareness on "Aquatic System".

What's missing here are the more colourful passages needed to balance out the sonic ecosystem, and the impeccable formal rigour at times tips over into outright monochrome. Above all, what's missing is a concrete protagonist for the landscape (the role water would go on to play in the following work), which here is narrated through generic, abstract sensory coordinates, but without the flair and variety needed to leave room for the listener's descriptive imagination.

Still, this is material of the highest quality, with a few gems of sound sculpture (the concréte-like memory of “Valo”, the subatomic immersion of “Hypnotism”) and a masterful finale entirely devoted to cosmic drone courtesy of the two halves of “Surfaces”. A work already capable of showing its author's potential, still grappling with the (necessary) refinement of a formula destined to prove far more than effective.

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31/08/2015