LOPSIDE

37

d. hinds (2003)

review by Bill Binkelman

I know very little about Dean Hinds, the man I assume is behind lopside. Liner notes on his latest album, 37, are non-existent. I think his intention is that ambient music should be an empty canvas when it comes to subtext (witness the title of the last song on the album, "titling instrumental tracks seems ridiculous"). The album 37 contains ten tracks which crisscross the glitch, noise, beat-driven ambient, and drifting ambient landscapes, sometimes pausing over one for awhile and other times taking a position so high in the sky above that all four enter the frame of reference at once. For example, on the first song, "the shallow end," once the track develops to fruition, you have minimal piano, glitch beats, repeating washes of spacy keyboards, and an assortment of scratching effects and distortion textures. Hinds makes this all fit for the most part, although on headphones the more abstract elements tend to overwhelm the more accessible ones. One song, "at the old place," lingers longer in glitch and minimal texture territory. I especially like the soft bell-like tones and the amount of sustain and reverb Hinds uses here. Unfortunately, he morphs the track into a much louder piece with the addition of several effects and textures, at least one of which is abrasive, not to mention what sounds like electric guitar. Played softly on loudspeakers, this may sound better than it does on headphones. He does quiet things down, and strips a lot of the "noise" out later in the song, though.

"to the point of obscurity" is gentle yet dark, featuring nice glitch/skitch beats and floating tones, and eventually bringing in some odd but pleasing treated vocal "sighs." "an evening with friends" has a playful sense of adventure to it, with assorted beats, glitch and others, a lot of electronic textural effects, scratching noises over some kind of spoken word dialogue, and a slow migration into a more straightforward marriage of cascading bell tones and trap kit drum and other beats. However, more often than not, songs end up going in directions that left me disoriented and disappointed. The somber dark ambient tones and drones of "standing at the mechanical ocean," build in intensity (which is fine) but end up yielding to a cacophonous explosion of over-amplified drums and vocal treatments, a trip into some sort of chaotic rhythmic overload. Likewise, "saturday driving music" begins promising with trip-hop drum kit rhythms and evocative keyboards but devolves into crashing garage-punk-band noise for a period before settling back into its original groove.

Whether or not you will enjoy 37 will depend on how open you are to compositions that mutate from their quiet minimal ambient openings to louder and more experimental/abstract songs. He can stretch out for awhile for longer periods of subtle minimalism, such as the opening tones and drones of "titling instrumental tracks seems ridiculous," or the twinkling reverberations and clicking beats at the start of "when all of my favorite moments have ended" but just when you're ready to settle in for some nice drifting, he decides to rev it all up and cut loose. Personally, I found it frustrating. If you hunger for something unusual and find a lot of minimal drone ambient and glitch ambient to be too pedestrian and tame, give 37 a try.