Alaska - Boreal

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  • If jungle is rare in the wider electronic music world these days, then ambient jungle is extinct. The precursor to atmospheric drum & bass of the sort championed by producers from LTJ Bukem to ASC, it coats soaring breaks in soothing strings and life-affirming pads. Alaska's last album, The Mesozoic Era, was basically a late-period manifesto for the sound, balancing percussive force and glacial white-out beauty. After what was promised to be the last salvo from Alaska, Dev Pandya brings the alias out once more for a ferocious twelve on his eponymous label. Perhaps befitting of its format, "Boreal" feels more immediate and aggressive than anything on Mesozoic, with that album's elaborate and immersive atmospheres reduced to a few layers of chrome-plated sustain chords and punishing breaks that could have been taken off an old Dillinja record. Pandya isn't one to use the same-old breaks, however, and "Boreal" thrashes with the same start-stop precision of his best drumfunk work as Paradox, lending his brand of jungle a certain nervy precision instead of prime jungle's timestretch terrorism. The flipside "Isochime" is lusher, mixing in nature soundscapes with gorgeous chimes, fluttering synths and soothing vocal gasps, with a similarly microscopically-diced breakbeat that feels less bottom-heavy than "Boreal" and more like it's weightlessly hurtling through the air at incomprehensible speeds.
  • Tracklist
      A Boreal A1 Isochime
RA