Interchill Records strikes again…
Liquid Stranger – Cryogenic Encounters
I’ve been a fan of Liquid Stranger since his first Interchill release years ago. He’s really willing to push the boundary of how far one can apply the dub paradigm. His first record was a great bouncy ethno-dub affair. His last record was a foray into dubstep, with a lot of ethno-instrumentation in the offing. I wasn’t a fan of that album because I’m constitutionally allergic to dubstep, but I had a lot of intellectual appreciation for the experimentation and super-hadron-colliding of styles.
This album is on a different level than all that previous work. This album is paced much slower, with many songs having l o n g ambiences, only punctuated by percussion in the middle stanzas; Frostbite and Cryo are perfect examples. Ectoplasm is one long ambience that makes me slightly teary. I wonder if Liquid Stranger has been hanging out with Solar Fields lately…They’re both in Sweden, not sure if Stefan is from Gothenburg. Something about the way the songs move between ambience and rhythms (not to mention the crystal clear sound design) seriously screams SOLAR FIELDS at you.
As the album name implies, the sound has a crystalline and ice-cold feel to it. It’s a sound you’d expect to hear from a Scandinavian. Again, I applaud the experiments in moving most of the themes of his sound into new thematic areas. We grabbed every thing from the album except for one song and slid it happily into the OEM library.