- Through all the albums, 12-inches, mixes and compilations that ASC has been involved in since his 2010 renaissance, it's his ambient material that's stood out the most. Though he's dabbled in beatless music for a long time, his love for it was rekindled around then, beginning with the excellent Deep Space mix series and blossoming into a trilogy of ambient LPs for Silent Season, which stand among the best work in his extensive catalogue. His ambient music reveals a gift for sonic world-building, where every track fosters an ecosystem of tiny sounds moving as one larger mass. That ear for detail has long defined James Clements' music, and it's starting to bleed through to his drum & bass work, too. Now, with Imagine The Future—his 12th LP as ASC—he finally lets his beats slip into the abyss, folding together the two sides of his musical personality.
Imagine The Future is not an ambient record, but it's written like one. The way Clements composes melodies on his Silent Season albums—slow, careful, almost passive—comes to life here, especially on the 13-minute opener "Sunspots." Unfolding over three sections that change so gradually you barely notice, it travels through funereal ambience and finely-wrought drum tracks, with a grand but controlled sense of scale that reflects Clements' experience scoring films and TV shows. It's full of sighing pads, neatly-arranged drums and mysterious bloops that sound like machines idly chattering to each other.
Even in its heaviest moments, like the trunk-rattling 170 BPM workouts "Unfriendly Waters" and "Axis Shift," Imagine The Future is graceful and lithe. Rather than crashing in, the beats surge and recede like tides. Clements' tracks rarely stay still for long. Take "Cosm," which begins with a tightly-wound industrial thrust before slipping into an indulgent breakdown that recalls Burial at his most sincere. It's an uncharacteristically direct moment for a producer whose icy chill often keeps listeners at arm's length. This flood of feeling washes in and subsides as smoothly as everything else on the LP.
You can dip in anywhere you want on Imagine The Future and fall right into Clements' rich, celestial world, where the misty pads and lightweight drums happen around you rather than in front of you. That immersiveness is a hallmark of his recent work, and it's never sounded as good as it does here. Reviewing his last Silent Season LP, I remarked on Clements' surprising decision to keep his drum & bass alias for his ambient work, as if Truth Be Told was just ASC "collapsed and disintegrated." Imagine The Future takes the astral sprawl of that record and pulls it right back into the orbit of drum & bass, even more exquisite and stunning than before.
Tracklist01. Sunspots (i. Event #1, ii. Event #2, iii. Event #3)
02. Bell Curve
03. Dark Matter
04. Response Code
05. Imagine The Future
06. Unfriendly Waters
07. Cosm
08. Axis Shift
09. Negative Space
10. The Secret Society
11. (Event #4)