As Huerco S., Brian Leeds got his start producing mottled, inward-leaning house music; several years into the project, he dropped the rhythmic imperative and released a pair of excellent—though sonically distinct—ambient releases. For Those of You Who Have Never (And Also Those Who Have) brought together a series of wandering melodies swaddled in dust and static; a stunning cassette for the Quiet Time label, several months later, was a half-hour-long frozen exhale conjuring an unfussy contemporary spiritualism. For Make Me Know You Sweet, the first release on his own new label, Leeds has adopted the moniker Pendant and further broadened the scope of his experiments in ambient sound.
Make Me Know You Sweet can be disconcerting, in part because it finds Leeds unlacing the sense of focus that structured his two most recent releases. Where For Those of You Who Have Never had its melodies (sometimes resembling a hold-tone sing-song put through the wash), and the Quiet Time cassette its clean, sustained tones, the seven tracks that comprise Make Me Know You Sweet are less direct. Texture and tone accumulate in layers of uneven residue, designating a headspace where ideas spill over—a greyed, dissociative kind of dreamy.
Leeds’ productions have long embraced a kind of sonic clutter, and the relative formlessness here underscores that tendency; the scattering of detail is what makes this album. “IBX-BZC” has a writhing feeling: It both rattles and drones, growing thick with dry samples that chirp in a way that’s half-machinic hum, half-field at night (is that a bird crowing in the distance?). Midway through “BBN-UWZ,” a more insistent synthesizer phrase perforates lilting melodic fog, altering the track’s course without ever overtaking it. “KVL-LWQ,” produced in Kansas with Pontiac Streator, follows a cleaner line but still wanders out from its woozy core progression with wisps of vaguely percussive static.
The mood throughout is one of relative ambivalence. When the pair of quasi-epics that close the album, “OXI-GKK” and “NMQ-HYT,” reach their respective crescendos, it’s not quite clear whether the music is is offering to envelop listeners or threatening to swallow them. That it could be both is part of what’s gently destabilizing about this release, which, for all its hazy sonic niceties, returns often to the flat, persistent tension that characterizes a generalized anxiety.
It’s tempting to talk about this album in the context of a supposed ambient revival, a balm for our world—and dancefloor-weary souls. (I’m still not over a recent Guardian article that, while alleging such a resurgence, called Huerco S. “ambient for the flat white generation.”) But this record, more than its predecessors, doesn’t fit easily within ideas of why we might want or need this kind of music right now. It’s not an escape to some other, better place; it’s not grand or conceptually driven; it’s certainly not regulating or functional, the kind of thing that helps you focus while you read or work. There’s something blissful about that lack of functionality, and in the multiple sometimes-contradictory surfaces these tracks contain: a series of overlapping paths leading nowhere in particular, a lovely reflection of the quietly wild nature of interiority itself.
