There's an image that keeps appearing in my head while listening to Maxmillion Dunbar's second album, House of Woo. It's of Andrew Field-Pickering, aka Maxmillion Dunbar, a balding, broad-shouldered, slightly round man who looks like someone capable of giving life-affirming hugs. By his own account, Field-Pickering spent a lot of time making Woo while lying in a recliner, looping its tracks for hours on end, while his girlfriend lay in a second recliner next to him. That I don't know what his girlfriend looks like doesn't matter. What's important is the image of this man, in a recliner for hours on end, content with the sound of his own crisp, blissful music.
Like a lot of young instrumental electronic producers in 2013, Field-Pickering's style sounds cherrypicked from a series of fashionable pasts, never unfamiliar but not easily pigeonholed either. His love for house is obvious, as is his love for the oblong swing of early 90s R&B. (He's also one half of Beautiful Swimmers, who have released a handful of oddball house tracks here and there, including a contribution to the Permanent Vacation label's wonderfully named If This is House I Want My Money Back Zwei.) But even at their most pounding, the rhythms of Woo feel secondary to its ambience, which is silvery and synthetic, but plays at being organic, like the weird waxy feel of a fake plant.
Field-Pickering's way with sound is Woo's most enchanting feature: the pinched-balloon squeals of "Ice Room Graffiti", the cascade of synthesized bells on "Coins for the Canopy", the meditative refrain of "Kangaroo"'s pale trumpets; sounds that lull the brain into some uncanny dead space where nothing quite seems real or imagined. It's tempting to write that Woo is an ambient album, but ambient music tends to interact with an existing environment instead of creating a new one entirely. Woo is like a pocket jungle for and by people who never leave the city.
In that sense, Field-Pickering's closest points of reference are guys like Wally Badarou and Jon Hassell, composers who got their start in the late 1970s making textured, polyethnic art music that blended live and synthesized instruments, guided more by the color of sound than structure. (Hassell once called it "coffee-colored classical.") Field-Pickering, though, isn't nearly as accommodating as Hassell, either in sound or vibe. Despite the hours of recliner replayability, nothing on Woo is particularly plush or friendly-- instead, it pushes happily into the unfamiliar, hacking away at the brush, disappearing into CGI shadows.
Woo is more or less an extension of-- and improvement on-- the ideas explored on Field-Pickering's debut, 2010's Cool Water. His curse is that he's making music in a field of alt-electronic bedroom producers both totally divorced from pop music and yet overcrowded with some of the most rote and uncreative musical minds imaginable. His gift is that he isn't one of them.
