Author: dave

Move D’s ‘Building Bridges’ is David Moufang’s latest studio album. Close friends and long time collaborators, Thomas Fehlmann, Fred P, Juju & Jordash, D-Man & rEAGENZ all feature alongside Benjamin Brunn. Building Bridges was recorded at reSource, Heidelberg between 1999-2019 except “One Small Step…” which was recorded at Thomas Fehlman’s Space in Berlin

One day I was sitting in a café drinking my coffee and listening to some background music playing. The music was coming from a digital source and due to poor connection, the sound was stopping occasionally and then resuming after a short pause. One of those pauses came right in the middle of a Fugees song and this “glitch machine” turned “Ready or Not” into “Radio… Not”. “Okay”, I thought, “this could be a cool title for a radio station. But what kind of music should it play? It should obviously be something that a real Russian FM station cannot play in prime time in 2010s”. Finally, I came to the idea of a “broadcast from a parallel world”, like in the middle of a sleepless night you tuned to a non-existent station playing ambient techno and telling stories about music and space exploration.

How one goes about surfing in the Arctic remains to be seen; perhaps our changing climate will make such a thing soon possible. Until then, we have to perform such a feat metaphorically, or at least do so vicariously, through the windswept beatscapes provided by the duo of Jarkko Turkulainen and Petter Friberg. The two Surfers manage to do a helluva job navigating their way across an icy tundra of expertly designed rhythm programming, over which skirt jittery synths making the most of sharp angles, steep inclines, and immaculately poised atmospheric tribbles that reflect a multitude of sun-dappled colors. There’s “Kotti”, made brighter still thanks to a heredity that encompasses early Boards of Canada as well as more serene bits championed by outfits such as Higher Intelligence Agency, and “Metropoli”, whose bright, choir-like airs and sumptuous digital ticktocks recall the best of Uwe Schmidt’s mid-90s Atom Heart percolations. Comparisons aside, the two Surfers distill their various influences so expertly that you shuck such notions off after hearing the first few absorbing bars of any given track, and truth be told, “Africao” is one of the most beautifully rendered slabs of neon-lit IDM that’s come down the pike in ages. Luminous they are, and frosty-eyed.