In even the most straightforward Tanner Matt production, there’s a moment where everything threatens to disintegrate. Since he began putting out leftfield house music in the early 2010s—working under aliases like Hashman Deejay, Studio Mody, and Ttam Renat, and in the groups Aquarian Foundation, Kinetic Electronix, and INTe*ra, among others—the Vancouver electronic musician has specialized in stripped-down tracks with shaky foundations and a sneaky dub underpinning. He’s fond of twisting the delay knob until the groove wobbles at the knees, or tweaking the syncopation until the downbeat disappears. A recent series of 12" EPs with the similarly elusive producer C3D-E has taken his trickster tendencies to the extreme, stretching blunted, sandblasted rhythm tracks into labyrinthine shapes and sidelong lengths. Now, on the debut album under his new alias Musicentrydelete, Matt applies his obscurantist instincts to a kind of minimalist ambient techno, to dreamily—and woozily—psychedelic effect.
If you had to sum up the album in a word, it would be “smeared.” It sounds like all 11 tracks were made with just one synthesizer, and most of the time its tones are blurred nearly beyond recognition, aquamarine chords churned into opalescent slurry. Where there are beats, they’re equally diffuse—hi-hats dissolving into lawn-sprinkler spray, kicks as pliable as chewing gum on hot pavement.
The opening “1izm” lays out the album’s curious palette, which is somehow murky and shimmery all at once. Slow-attack tones emerge and are subsumed back within the haze, like single strands of a spiderweb zooming in and out of focus; the uppermost reaches are suffused in a delicate scrim of what sounds like electronic crickets. Much of the record’s action happens in the high end, where bright, digital harmonics fizz and glisten, dust motes in a strip-mall crystal emporium. “K1Deep” moves with a new-agey swirl, but there’s a brittleness to its queasily insistent treble frequencies. That’s in keeping with the album’s overall vibe; even at its most placid, there’s an unsettling undercurrent.
The balance between stasis and movement is central to most of these tracks, which are typically built around extended tones that twist in place. Sometimes Matt lets his LFOs do much of the work for him: The brief “RiseMODX” is a single held chord shaped and filtered by various modulations. Elsewhere, jolts of intensity come from human hands turning round knobs in real time. Little bursts of dub delay flare without warning, kicking up dust devils; every now and then, the telltale sweep of the pitch-bend wheel flicks upward like a fast-rising tide and then, after a minute or two, falls back into place.
Unlike most of the records Matt has released, Selfless isn’t really dance music, but neither is it strictly ambient; it bobs in a nether zone where fluttering repetitions are further stirred by deep-diving kick drums. (Its closest analog might be Vainqueur’s 1997 album Elevations, a particularly buoyant take on Basic Channel-style dub techno at its most aerated.) The 10 tracks are drawn from a batch of more than 200, and you can hear him returning to certain ideas again and again.
“Sub AM,” “Musicentrydelete,” “Wavebeats,” “wavebeats (dub),” and “eBase” are all variations upon a theme pairing repetitive synth patterns with booming, lopsided drums. The sound design of his kick drums deserves special mention; rather than simple heartbeats or mere rhythmic anchors, his bass drums are dynamic agents, diving in pitch across their long sustain and decay. Sometimes they feel like slumping shoulders, millisecond-long expressions of defeat shrugged over and over again.
The sweetest track is the penultimate cut, “Depth,” whose chordal flicker is as weightless as a blinking eyelash, its tonal arc broad and graceful; the bittersweet freeze-framing reminds me of ambient-techno classics like Dettinger’s “Intershop (7)” and Autechre’s “Yulquen.” The album’s center of gravity is conclusion “eBase,” rolling up stern percussion, disorienting polyrhythms, and churning chords into a 17-minute epic that never stops shapeshifting. What begins as a slow, lumbering triplet rhythm gradually morphs into a fleet and elegant quasi-acid jam; drums that start off gently turn tough and clattering before the whole thing fades out in a soft sunset glow. Try as I might, I can’t quite parse its mechanics. What seems at first like the downbeat eventually dissolves into the track’s spongy matrix of pulses and offbeat accents. Solid ground disappears; for a blissful quarter of an hour or so, you might as well be floating.
