![]() Its methodology is subtle, but its mood is immediate. And no, that's not to say that Ardour is about as interesting as watching grass grow. Such elements make songs like "My Whole Life" and "Wind Loop" into drum-rich tracks that sinuously trickle instead of straight-up banging.Ī lot of ink and pixels have been thrown around trying to make a case for the idea of electronic music's organic possibilities, but Ardour actually captures the sonic equivalent of watching biological life expand in sped-up time-lapse. Percussive elements are built in a way that puts kicks and snares front and center, but lets just enough supplemental backbeat elements like backspun loops, flowing chimes, and sparking electronic synapses bubble under the surface so that even the most minimalist rhythms sound mystifyingly busy. There's a trilling piano glissando on "Moments", tweaked at points- drenched in reverb, distorted, subsumed under layers of percussion and hiss- to halfway convince you into thinking it might not actually be a piano at all. That's a wobbly harp on "Double Fifths", though in the first few seconds of the loop getting spooled up, it sounds like an out-of-tune ukulele, and over the course of the song its off-time loops start to come across as precipitation rather than a set of strings. Here's what I mean: try and focus on a specific instrument when you listen to an individual track, and you'll discover that Teebs' manipulation has rendered it into something unexpected. For all the artisanal care that went into this album's creation, it sounds like decaying beats being split apart by deceptively fragile yet resilient melodies, post-hip-hop production as a simulation of nature reclaiming concrete. Think of a building that's been left unattended for 100 years, and all of the foliage that pushes up through it and engulfs its crumbling foundations. But who Teebs knows, how he came up, the creation process, what scenes he's echoing off and adding to- well, it's important, but there's something about Ardour that makes it feel like it has no manmade origin. Run in certain beat-geek circles, and you might start getting an idea of what his deal is just from those details. He's a visual artist turned musician, he shared an apartment building with mentors Flying Lotus and Samiyam, and he put together his first Brainfeeder release, Ardour, over a two-year stretch that saw his father pass away. Teebs has been billed as someone who benefits from his dues-paying backstory.
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