patten's music is all sharp edges, cut from shapes that never sit easily alongside one another. The largely anonymous London-based producer has been around for a while, releasing music by others on his Kaleidoscope label, and making his first venture as patten with a CDR titled There Were Horizons back in 2007. His first official release, GLAQJO XAACSSO for No Pain in Pop, demonstrated his Warp fandom. This new collection, ESTOILE NAIANT, offers an alteration of the patten sound, picking up a thread from the more thought-out structures of last year's EOLIAN INSTATE EP, where room to breathe became as important as the restricted spaces of his prior work.
Throwing a veil of anonymity over proceedings rarely has the desired effect, often drawing attention to the personality behind the music instead of deflecting attention away from it. Just look at the endless questions that were raised in online discussions about Burial's pre-selfie identity, and the by-now quite tedious (and, at times, baffling) trove of misinformation trailing in his wake. "I wonder whether the focus could remain more fully on the materials produced without it being about the person, or people, who made it as such," patten said in an interview, on his desire to remain unidentified. Drawing such a big question mark, and making oblique Twitter posts and statements like "best and worst don't actually exist" (from the same interview), make it feel like he's craving attention, not shrinking from it. Besides, he doesn't appear to have much in his locker to differentiate himself from others who have chosen this path.
The net result of the half-thoughts that make up the patten mythos throw the music into a certain light, depending on how it's received. Certainly, if you buy into it, your expectations are likely to be raised. The ideas behind the music of ESTOILE NAIANT mostly work as a reflector of the energy he's using to construct a world outside the music, where tried-and-tested concepts are executed with a degree of precision, occasional inspiration, and a sizable volume of backward referencing to ground already covered elsewhere. It often skirts around junior Autechre mode, where jarring noises barely fit together and accelerate toward a place of further disharmony as the track progresses ("Drift", "Key Embedded"). In softer territory the spectre of Boards of Canada is undeniable ("23-45"). At times, on the better material here, patten builds a satisfyingly awkward bridge between his inclinations to amble and to stick a fork in his machinery ("Agen").
Bringing together strange juxtapositions produces some of the strongest work on ESTOILE NAIANT—the broken-down drum kit skittering over a faltering loop on "Gold Arc", the finicky beat set to a whistling motif on "Winter Strobing". But there's rarely a sense of direction, with tracks that build into turmoil often gaining superfluous extra layers, and works that fade into the shadows feeling oddly inconsequential. The overwhelming mood is one of ideas gathered, processed, and left to dangle in the air without much to frame them. "Maybe there's something interesting about finding methods of working where you can transcend your imagination so you’re not necessarily beginning with an end in sight," patten told Dummy, in a 2011 interview. On ESTOILE NAIANT it feel like that approach still informs what he does, but music that works effectively without end, that circles in place, still needs to find a strong position in the world.
