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Quoting the blurb, this album is “an exploration of that which lies just below the threshold of consciousness, where subject and object lose their distinction and the definitions of the commonplace lose their validity.” So either this is about that period in time somewhere around your ninth Hoegaarden, or it’s chillout.

It's chillout, of course. Bluetech kicks the album off properly with Ice Forming On Glass, which sounds like pretty much what it says on the tin. Less is more, with plinky crystalline sounds forming on your field of aural vision (etc) in a nice but ultimately rather directionless way. Sympath’s Amethyst is laceryne dub-in-dub, some very neat sounds and orchestration going on over a titch-titch backdrop. String Theories’ White Dragon is firmly in that ambient/glitch sort of vein; you know, the one that takes the sound of a CD skipping and uses it in percussion. I’m not sure I get it. Musically it’s interesting, even compelling. But the vibe of the track is depressing and introspective; fine in itself, but I don’t feel that it succeeds in anything outside of this. Which could be the point of course but, to repeat: I’m not sure I get it.

I do, however, get Marconi Union’s Buildings and People, and it’s bloody sublime. This is something that sounds like Pink Floyd if they were signed to Warp, with a tangible flow across its sub-five-minutes that makes it sound like an eternity has passed. It’s quality, it’s interesting, it’s intricate, it’s everything that I think this album is doing its best to be. krill.minima’s CatDinR42 is back to the noodly, giving way to Nalaepa’s Porcelain: another fine piece of music, in that drone/glitch/IDM vein but with enough substance and character to elevate itself above the inherent postmodernism that affects the IDM genre like a syphilis: to wit, Ganucheau’s over-indulgence Stillness.

Rena Jones comes up with another nice taste of the upcoming album, Aurora Borealis being a paced, smooth ride through atonal sounds and pleasing changes, a vibe that gets lost on Desert Dwellers’ sparse and daftly-named Stellar Dendrites. Bluetech vs Shulman’s Midnight Bloom is one hell of a collaboration. The former lends intricacy to the latter, and the latter lends psy-chill grounding to the former. Probably the most cohesive track on the album, the way it escalates before falling in on itself, only to surface later, is staggeringly well-executed. Aerotastic is back again in that alienating vibe of whateverscape, which is more or less echoed in David Last’s final track.

Okay then. We shouldn’t – nor, to be fair, can we – review this in the light of other “psychedelic chillout” releases, because this ain’t it. This, kids, is IDM – intelligent dance music – or Intelltronica. Or whatever. And those two words – “or whatever” – are for the present writer the whole problem with the IDM genre. It tries too hard to be intelligent, it tries too hard to distance itself from other areas of dance music which, in virtue of its loftily aspirational name, it by default considers to be unintelligent.

As such the genre, much like this album, is like that bloke at the party with that unswerving superiority complex. IDM thinks it’s amazing and more significant than other genres. Let’s let them continue to think that.

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