Signer
Low Light Dreams
Carpark
Signer’s Low Light Dreams has won me over, to some degree. I don’t know what makes this album work. It sounds like a 16 year-old kid with a laptop who loves the 1/5th of Bill Laswell’s collected body of work that is really amazing. There is something very charming and exciting about this recording that is just absent from so many other releases on the Carpark label, and in electronic music in general.
The beats aren’t particularly intense, there are droney synth washes, dub bass lines, and looping melodic structures. Obviously, not altogether a new phenomenon. Yet Signer has amazing intuition and while he’s making exciting and youthful work, manages to retain a layer of subtlety.
There is an entire album of sounds mixed incredibly softly underneath the dominant sounds on Low Light Dreams. This all results in a particular sense of atmosphere that tends to get glossed over in a fair share of ambient music. There is a great sense of tonality, an acute sense of structure in each piece, and granted, with not too much ambition, it achieves exactly what it sets out to do.
Hopefully, as Signer progresses musically, he will begin to emphasize the nuances he brings to the well-travelled idioms that appear on Low Light Dreams . That sense of quietness and atmosphere, that sense of tonality, the love of effervescent dub bass lines, but removed from the stigma that comes with his insistence on dance rhythm (regardless of how understated). With such aesthetic nuance, Signer needs to take his content to the next level. Low Light Dreams is an album about falling asleep, which is a wonderful thing to do, but something that has been tackled musically for quite some time now. With luck, Signer has put this album behind him and is ready to deal with less comfortable ground.
Carpark Records: http://www.carparkrecords.com/
