Ada - Forty Winks

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  • It's perhaps a testament to how far Ada has softened up listeners to her sound over the years that when a dreamy guitar pops in to say hello five minutes deep into "Forty Winks" that you won't bat an eye. Michaela Dippel has ploughed a path parallel to her Areal labelmates, but one that is rarely perpendicular: Like Basteroid and others, her music is too weird for functionality, and unlike them it's too beautiful to ignore. (Theirs, by contrast, is often too beautifully ugly to ignore.) This latest release comes on Areal's sublabel, IRR, and things haven't changed much. Ada's tracks here once again fit on romantic Kompakt-heavy floors, but noticeably lack the pump to sit alongside much else. That's a good thing in the case of "Forty Winks." Its reference to sleep is telling: The beat shuffles along, an organ plays a lulling four note melody, the whole thing slows down to a crawl without cause and then picks back up sans beat and with a piano in tow. Later? This patient track picks up the aforementioned guitar and some wordless vocals. Like some of the best of Dippel's work, you're not sure you'd ever want to hear it on a dance floor—and you're OK with that. "Kink A Jou" is less immediately successful, shoehorning a slightly awkward countermelody into beautifully laid-out proceedings. Instead of the tight puzzle pieces that Dippel's track elements most often resemble—her command of strikingly different sounds is the key to her success—this time around it doesn't quite cohere. Even if it does sound mighty pretty.
  • Tracklist
      A Forty Winks B Kink A Jou
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