Like a lot of things related to White Material, the vinyl-only New York techno label founded by DJ Richard and Young Male, Studio OST's debut album deliberately keeps a low profile. The unassuming title, Scenes 2012-2015, suggests a hodgepodge; it also suggests that the material inside is old news (and there's nothing worse in electronic music, which is generally thought to evolve at lightning speed). Likewise, the project's generic-sounding alias, with its air of anonymous work-for-hire, sounds less like an artist's name than an obscure bit of metadata, and it leaves out any indication that White Material's Alvin Aronson and Galcher Lustwerk are involved, despite the substantial weight that the latter's name carries as one of the most hotly buzzed-about artists in recent underground American dance music.
But Scenes 2012-2015, which the two RISD grads recorded over three years in a handful of home studios around New York, is no hodgepodge. It's a proper album—the kind that conventional wisdom says that dance music is no good at producing. It's got a beginning, a middle, and an end, and its A and B sides tell slightly different stories; it's meant to be listened to in one sitting, all the way through. And while the album's nine tracks are plenty diverse, encompassing ambient sketches, techno and electro patterns pitched at a wide range of tempos, and even a flickering, 144-BPM study in juke's full-throttle skip, they're also unusually cohesive. They make do with a pared-down set of sounds that give the impression of coming from a modest set of gear, and they avoid samples, advanced digital sound design, and intricate computer trickery in favor of long, linear synthesizer and drum machine patterns, loosely and elegantly woven together. The palette is muted but not self-consciously lo-fi, and the mood oscillates between dreamy and melancholy, though not without a playful undercurrent.
Unlike Lustwerk's music, all nine tracks are instrumental, aside from the occasional garbled hint of ring-modulated speech buried deep in the mix, like an intercepted transmission from across the cosmos. The two musicians' respective styles surface in shifting proportions: "Above the Waves," with its squelchy funk bass and almost jazzy Rhodes keys, recalls Lustwerk's solo productions; "ITCZ," a fuzzed-out daydream for wispy chords and a clunky vintage CR-78 drum machine, shares the hazy vibes of Aronson's "Fog City," from last year's City EP. What predominates is their shared appreciation for ’90s electronic music: Much of the album brings to mind the sound of R&S Records and its Apollo sub-label from the mid ’90s, when artists like Ken Ishii and Biosphere were fusing ambient and techno in exciting ways. "Session" has the crisp, sparkling quality of artists like Morgan Geist and Titonton Duvanté; the stunning "Whitesands," which closes the album with a moody swirl of plangent fifths and crunchy percussion, might be a lost Aphex Twin or Autechre demo circa 1994.
The centerpieces of the album are "ITCZ" and "Unnatural City," which spin mechanical clatter, shimmering chords, and deep-diving bass frequencies—in the latter, there's no bassline to speak of, just an 808 kick plunging unfathomably low—into sedate, hypnotic configurations. "ITCZ," rolling out ceaseless son clave rhythms, is plodding and steady, while "Unnatural City" moves at a fleet, rolling clip, but what they share in common is an unusual balance between stasis and dynamism. No single element dominates; every sound has equal weight, from quicksilver pings to chalky snares. They're not so much songs as spatial fields: You enter and walk around, admiring the ingenious architecture, and five minutes later, you leave—albeit somewhat reluctantly. But Aronson and Lustwerk are smart enough to know when to hold back, and as a result, they've come up with one of the year's most generously proportioned techno long-players—one far more sumptuous than its modest profile would ever suggest.
