- As the name suggests, Ecologies II is a sequel. Its predecessor, also for Kuedo and Joe Shakespeare's Knives label, was about "the representations of nature that emerge from the digital-social media scape." This time, Lithuanian producer J.G. Biberkopf has scaled up his ambition, addressing "the way global politics shapes the Earth's ecosystem and the architectures and infrastructures of power." You get a taste of these sweeping themes from titles like "Globalalia" (a babble of auto-tuned voices over foreboding synth melodies) and "New World Order" (the grand melancholy of Kuedo with a chrome-plated sheen).
Biberkopf uses a mixed toolbox, and sometimes he finds an intriguing liminal zone between field recordings and ultra-shiny synthesis. On the aptly named "Realer Than Real," mundane animal sounds—quacking ducks, tweeting birds—are shredded by piston-like blasts of synth. "Irreversible. Black Atlantic." is a strange twilight of half-defined shapes, provenance unclear. But mostly, the producer favours clumsier blocks of synthetic material: emotive chord loops ("Wetware"), trance melodies locked in Lorenzo Senni holding patterns (two versions of "Transfiguration"), imposing foghorn blasts ("Technocracy") and the odd sheet of excoriating noise ("Immersion Into Noise").
Sometimes this works. "Dust" benefits from the album's strongest bit of melody, and "Preacher" has an anxious dynamism that's missing elsewhere. But mostly, the music offers little beyond hints at a grand meaning that's never satisfyingly explained. It's not that you can't tackle these topics on an album: as Ceramic TL, Egyptrixx recently depicted "environmental cataclysm" through blistering, doom-laden synthscapes. Nor do you need to be sledgehammer literal in order to do it. But there's little to decipher in Biberkopf's slow, blockwise structures and pregnant pauses. And if you're looking for answers, avoid the record's nonsensical booklet.
Tracklist01. Technocracy
02. From Infinity To Here
03. Wetware
04. Transfiguration I: Enlightenment
05. Dust
06. Transfiguration II: Amplification
07. Preacher
08. Globalalia
09. Irreversible. Black Atlantic.
10. Immersion Into Noise
11. New World Order
12. Eruption Of The Amorphous
13. Realer Than Real