Last year, Riley Reinhold released a co-written EP, Friends are Silence. It was rubbish, but the excuse was that it had been a collaboration. At the time, I wondered two things: was the release a by-product of a market where the “release reflex” had become compulsive, and secondly, would Riley (himself a label owner) have released his own work if he’d received it as a promo? But let’s leave the excuses and accusations aside for a moment - let’s give Riley a chance.
For the price of admission, what’s offered here are two different sides to one coin cast in the same alloy - wafting, introspective digi-trance with its heart on its sleeve and its finger on the mouse-key, dragging and dropping various kinds of delay plugins over the melodies. Yeah, I was once in a noise-rock band, and being beyond awful and in the throes of a particularly nasty Sonic Youth trip, we saw fit to drench everything in as much reverb, distortion and delay as possible. The Big Muff was my best friend.
I call the laptop equivalent of this “Abletonitis”, and Riley’s only just besting his bout of it here. The A-side, “Light in my Eyes”, grounds the track with a static, dry kick-snare pattern which is left unmodulated in the back of the mix. Over the top, a simple synthloop is leant texture and shift (more by plugin than art) and then, right over the top of that like some imagined “northern lights” pattern, come several big blue synth washes, one after the other. Atmospherically it’s nice, but at over eight minutes long the soft rinse begins to dry, drag, and then drone on. Compare this track to Sascha Funke’s recent “Ey” (reviewed here a few months back) which conjures similar blisses of navel-gazing but with no more complexity. Perhaps with this kind of music, it’s all about the ineffable qualities of the sounds chosen (’cos after all, if it sounds on every beat you’re gonna hear it over a thousand times in an eight minute track). The B-side, “Ghosts”, sounds…that’s right, spookier (!) than the A, but again, the track relies too much on the emotive effects of FX gimmicks and pays too little attention to the small details of construction and nuance necessary to make such flights of fancy soar.
There’s the nub of something promising here, and it is an improvement on Friends are Silence, but while I’d urge Riley to continue developing his sound/ideas, I still wouldn’t inflict this on the dancing public.
My Best Friend / MBFLTD 12013
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[Peter Chambers]