headline: fat mulching around (this is right beneath a picture of you... te-hee)

preface:
if you put chris isaac thru the audiomulch software it may get melancholic in a
menacing way. ruaridh law of glasgow puts together others material to unsettling
intropsectives.

text:
<italic> imagine you're standing in the middle of the woods, a beck is flowing
nearby, the wind is carrying faint sounds of far away voices. the situation might be
menacing or it might be peaceful, but maybe it's neither of these. </italic> anwers
ruaridh law - glagows restless electronica activist, member of the mbsfg and the
drone duo rose & sandy - to the question in which siuation or place his music might
be mirrored. lying beneath ruaridhs decent (subtle?) ironic pathos is a lot of truth
about the music of his current album 'et in arcadia ego' from his solo project tvo.
it's literaly overflowing of touching introspective emphasis. the tracks 'sunken'
and 'coshh' rank way up amongst the electronica tracks of the year. these are tear
provoking, deeply melancholic, contemplating, world embracing gestures - of a kidn
that usually only christian fennsz wrings out of the microprocessor.

sounds like romantic-esotherik escapism? like sentimental kitsch? maybe on the
surface. but ruaridhs style of production alone cancels out such suspicions and
party-pooper-allegations, because his musical view of the world is in the first
place a view thru the eyes of others. 'et in arcadia ego' is compeltly based on
sampled starting material that builds a subtle and fuzzy network behind the obvious,
melancholic facade. this has nothing in common with introversion in a romantic or
even esotheric sense, it's more like proust-ic lime-blossom-tea. in any case it's
the other, very awake, reflective side of ruaridhs village orchestra.

the piece 'jacob/ bad hand at cards v2' for instance is build exclusively from
harmonies out of chris isaacs yearn-hymnus 'wicked games' <italic> in the end the
album is some kind of hommage to the music that (sometimes unconsciously) influenced
me. there is one track completly generated from material of an artist i hate. it
surely is an introspective album, and i think it is deeply living out of the past.
for me it has an element of catharsis' </italic>

the software audiomluch, which ruaridh is using almost exclusively, enables him to
play samples with microscopic precission. out of the reverb of chris isaacs guitar
for instance there's a wallowing, elegiac carpet rising. the outlines of the sample
got blurred so much that only an inkling of teh original sound is shining. what's
left is often - as in 'wicked games - the most basic harmonies, like a fading memory
of the song or the time that has edged the music into ones brain. and these memories
on 'et in arcadia ego' don't soudn exclusively sentimental or melancholic - but
sometimes indeed have a slightly menacing and urging undertone. ruaridh law
consequently denies explicit gestures and instead plays with hints, blurring and
ambivalence. so it's up to the listener to decide if this is only an exceptional
beautiful electronica record or an intresting and complex concept album about themes
like memories and memory. maybe it's both. but it certainly is one of the best and
most yielding electronica records of the year.