- This Persona label showcase finds Stewart Walker continuing to explore the divide between dancefloor stomp and domestic pleasantries, a location he claimed as his own back on his 1999 expedition 'Stabiles'. While that collection, and last year's 'Grounded in Existence', kept things anaesthetised at the head-nod level, 'Persona's Progress' seems more geared towards getting off the couch, reflecting the label's move from Boston to Berlin.
Walker's own productions have shown his considerable skill at straddling this fence: occasionally raucous but often restrained, sleek and dark, his tracks are shaded with requisite dabs of reverb and fuelled by sparse but propulsive basslines. Opener 'Ten Years of Anger' fits the mould beautifully, everything clicking along with the steady glide of an electric train. Marco Tonni as Touane shimmies in next with 'Esitazione', which moves from smooth sensuality into a sweaty funk of hard drums, mechanised female gasps and clinking Chinese massage balls. By Walker's 'Crabgrass vs. Monkeygrass', these dizzying peaks have been flattened, the buzzsaws turn into twee guitars, and we're back on our seats. Gustavo Lamas' 'Convoca' keeps the view hazy with pop, crackle and click percussion recalling the sweetness of IDM pretty-boys at City Centre Office. Touane's 'Es Tut Mir Leid' is further misleading, incorporating whines, whale song and MBV distortion before a softened acid squelch threatens to up the ante, slightly.
Here lies the problem: Walker has assembled his leading lights in a collection that is neither down-tempo enjoyment nor floor-filling excitement but rather a disorienting blend of the two. At best Walker can make music as downright lush as Consumed-era Plastikman, piecemeal dub components offsetting precise click, glitch and thud, and his comrades here reveal moments of equal promise. Gregory Shiff's 'Subway Flood', for instance, is infectious dancefloor skiffle, shards of grit dancing from left to right, and the percussion of Touane's 'Bassic' seems to emanate through closed doors, leaping out with a geeky but delicious melody you'll be humming by the disc's end. Walker's penultimate 'Elevator Dream', a beautiful combination of restrained pings and tics, slows things down before Touane finishes with a jig to the chimes and bells of an old Swiss clock.
Walker's digital mixing adds some sense: cuts bleed into one another with nary a rugged contrast in sight. But throughout there's an ongoing feeling of lack. Tracks are frequently cluttered with glitch, whirr and bang, but never allowed to growl and distort into the red. Track two is the highlight, and then it's an uneven to and fro to the finish that's often interesting but never exhilarating.