- Unmoored from techno, the Pittsburgh artist hits creative heights.
- The pace and consistency of Shawn Rudiman's output lends itself to the clichéd image of the master patiently toiling away in his private quarters, making masterpieces without a care if anyone notices. Recent archival releases like Timespan and Synthdrome Vault Archives, which collected impeccable music recorded over two decades, made it seem like this stuff just pours out of him. Those releases, along with last year's Conduit and the occasional festival appearance, helped bring Rudiman to a wider audience, some 30 years into his music-making career.
Now it seems the floodgates have opened. Following on Conduit's heels comes Flow State, a "companion piece" that runs almost double the length of its predecessor. Split between ambient mood pieces and ambling Midwestern techno, Flow State presents Rudiman as a painterly producer. He creates wordless songs that exude feeling, sometimes anxious, but usually wondrous or content.
Flow State, as the organizationally inclined will know, refers to a mental state in which the person is completely immersed in their task, undisturbed and unconcerned by the outside world. The album embodies this in style and approach: it sounds like the product of someone who has achieved that elusive state, and keeps the listener locked in it as well.
At 21 tracks and, in its most complete version, around two hours long, Flow State can seem daunting. I prefer to think of it as generous. It might be slightly overstuffed, but it has the careful, dynamic sequencing that made Conduit so strong. Techno actually seems like an afterthought here—most of the tracks are made from swooning melodies and pads that drift like fog. At its most placid, Flow State resembles the rainy-day ambient of Loscil. In other moments, it has an impossibly deep dub techno thump, swaddled in layers of gauze.
You'll find plenty of established Midwest tropes that Rudiman, a dedicated pupil of the second wave of Detroit techno, loves to reference in his work, but there are also plenty of outré detours. The first track with kick drums, "Cloud Lane Motel," has a pretty funky slap bass. You'll hear chiming electric guitar in other tracks, and Berlin-school ambience on "Missteps." Often the techno pulse is replaced with a Kraut-y meander, which makes tracks like "Re-Tethered," or the loud, brash sequencers of the closer, "There Never Was A Tomorrow, Was There?," feel especially open-ended and creative. Unmoored from techno, Rudiman chases his fancy wherever it takes him.
It takes a certain kind of listener to appreciate this LP in all its unhurried glory, but the record is also diverse enough that you could choose pretty much any track at random and find something to love. (The "Director's Cut" continuous mix on Bandcamp is well worth checking out, too.) Flow State lives up to a certain '90s techno ideal, when artists used the album format to probe at the outer reaches of their sound, and often stuffed CDs to their 80-minute max, putting every moment to good use. Flow State exists in that tradition, the humble and brilliant fruits of a producer who goes to his studio every day and simply records what flows out of him.
Tracklist01. 80 Years Of Hypersleep
02. Numeric Tenderness
03. Cloud Lake Motel
04. Wave Effect
05. The Breathing Machine
06. Power Exposure
07. There Is No Sanctuary
08. Untethered
09. Re-Tethered
10. Pollution Dreams
11. Soshu Kitae (Masamune's Forge)
12. Savage Enlightenment
13. Internal Trigger
14. There's A Darkness Under Every Sun
15. Missteps
16. Another Imminent Collapse
17. The Introduction To The End
18. There Never Was a Tomorrow, Was There?
19. Wash Over Me (Digital Exclusive)
20. Soshu Kitae (Digital Exclusive)
21. I'd Like To Extend My Stay At The Cloud Lake Motel (Digital Exclusive)
22. Flow State (Director's Cut)