This past winter, Jeremy Greenspan of Junior Boys and Ryan Smith (aka Taraval, and also a touring member of Caribou) returned to their shared hometown of Hamilton, Ontario to record a series of hardware experiments that would become this collaborative EP. After toying with an extensive list of synthesizers that includes, but is not limited to, a Yamaha CS50, a Roland Jupiter 6 and JX8P, and an Arp Odyssey, the pair cut the results down into relatively concise pieces whose exploratory tendencies are counterbalanced by compositional precision. Indebted to process and the materials from which it’s built, Greenspan and Taraval skews more subtle and heady than either artist’s solo work.
Though the backbone of this EP is a particular kind of hardware obsessiveness, it’s still fundamentally a dance album. It just requests attentive listening for reasons more formal than conceptual. Their techno is constructed on sturdy ground, but builds itself up in intricate ways. Opener “Earthly Delights” is painted over with hazy swaths of ambient melody, gradually thickening through the addition of barely-perceptible bassy rumbles; the terse “Hold Time for a Day” shifts its focus from acid phrases into anxious interlocking percussion. “Be Last” is the least decorated but most club-ready track here, a mesh of sticky beats driven forward by persistent hi-hats.
Greenspan and Smith cite a group of synth pioneers including Cluster, JD Emmanuel, and John Carpenter, though their own take on this experimental classicism is packaged within clubbier tracks. These influences are blended so that no moment feels like an homage; rather, it’s when the pair lock into a groove that some weirdness comes to the fore. On standout “Follow the Moonlight” which is built around dull-edged rattling, its near-soporific landscape is pierced here and there by irregular laser blips. And “Daff” produces sonic terrain through what feels like a deliberate process of subtraction or withholding, its occasional cushions of synthesizer melody receding to leave a metallic skeleton.
Though it reaches out in directions both historical and futuristic, this EP feels neither vintage nor particularly innovative. However, despite an evident wide-eyed appreciation for their instruments, Greenspan and Smith avoid the trap of maximalism or sinking too deep into the worlds they open up; the artists maintain a well-drawn sense of these tracks’ larger picture, which keeps their experiments wholly digestible. Studied and meticulously designed, it’s intelligent music that does most of the legwork for the listener.
