Brian Piñeyro is part of a bustling New York club music demimonde that includes similarly leftfield-inclined producers such as Anthony Naples, Huerco S., and Patricia. But the Queens-based beatmaker is also verging on a mini-scene all by himself. DJ Wey, DJ Python, DJ Xanax, and now Luis—for a relatively green musician, Piñeyro has run up more than his share of pseudonyms, a tactic that seems part about minimizing awkward questions of identity, and partly about enjoying the freedom that comes from being a little slippery.
Dreamt Takes, his debut 12-inch as Luis, bears traces of what has come before—hazy-eyed synths, brittle hardware drums, a slight wonkiness of rhythm—while adding additional hazy atmospherics, a sort of cotton-wool fuzziness that surrounds and permeates everything. If these tracks have a historical antecedent, it’s that early ’90s branching of the hardcore continuum that spawned Warp’s Artificial Intelligence compilations, which saw then-green names like Autechre, Speedy J, and Polygon Window crossbreed hardcore and rave with the introspective head music of Tangerine Dream and Pink Floyd. Opener “HV’s Sequence” employs the same building blocks as pretty much any given early ’90s hardcore 12”—rattling breakbeats, clipped vocal samples, shuddering bass—but is unlikely to burn up the dance floor, instead aiming for blissful reverie. “Talk Me Down,” meanwhile, slices jungle snares into slim fillets and interlaces them with shimmering 8-bit effects; so pared back are its rhythms that you’re drawn to fill in the gaps yourself, although Piñeyro occasionally pitches in a flurry of drill‘n’bass beats to gesture in the right direction.
Dreamt Takes is a reminder that it wasn’t its much-vaunted “intelligence” that made IDM distinct from the club scenes it span off, but mood and melody. “Shea’s World” suggests that Piñeyro hasn’t yet totally perfected the latter, its cycling of the same motif getting stale around the fifth minute. But the closing “Kirgaly” strikes the right balance between cranky deconstruction and melodic prettiness, a gem of misty-morning acid that’s throwing in neat twists and turns right to close. Whether Dreamt Takes is Piñeyro inching closer to a signature sound or just off another diversion isn’t clear, but for now his elusiveness is endearing.
