Variants Of Perception

2022 release. A man of prolific means and invention to match, Mick Chillage is one of those names virtually synonymous with deep, high-quality, far-reaching electronic music, an artist who easily glides between modes of ambience and rhythmic facility with a finely-honed, agile grace. His return to the Carpe Sonum fold is no less dramatic. The lengthy pieces adorning this latest work allow the artist's usual stately pace to run free and allow his gradually dawning motifs room to pulse and breathe; ten minutes of a typical Chillage piece often exposes more ideas per second than other artist's whole volumes. The dramatis analogae of "Echoes of Perception" takes in a veritable smorgasbord of synths, modules, pads, sequencers, bass, and perambulating ghost-voices that together paint a unearthly picture teeming with all sorts of wonderfully devised gossamer and broad, electronic gimcrackery. His many collaborations with Lee Norris as Autumn of Communion seemed to have rubbed off on this one, as Chillage fairly revels in a bubbling tableau of starshine beats, spaced-out shimmer, and supple beds of pillowly-soft rhythmatix. "A Recollection of Distant Environments" finds him channelling the ever-present (and reverential) Namlookisms of yore but skewed through a Berlin school filter of chocolate-coated sequencers, and the kind of beat structure so beloved of IDMers from Boards of Canada to Black Dog, further reincarnated from late 90s imprints such as n5MD, De: focus, and Rephlex. Sweet licorice labyrinths of sonic perambula to get all twisty in.