Eedl: Everse
spa.RK

Fibla: Liants
spa.RK

The Spanish electronic scene is handily represented by two finely-crafted releases from the spa.RK imprint, Fibla's (spa.RK owner Vicent Fibla) Liants and Eedl's (Joan Duat and Miguel Angel Martinez) Everse. This is classic, multi-colour IDM—sunlit and languorous in Fibla's case and punchy and squiggly in Eedl's—executed with care.

Put simply, Liants amounts to forty minutes of meticulously assembled and multi-layered tracks brimming with clicking beats, digital textures, wistful keyboard melodies, serpentine bass lines. Sometimes joined by voice edits and Rhodes sprinkles, sparkling melodies float over softly swinging grooves throughout. Representative of the album's style, “Merendero Alfacs, 1978” unspools dreamily with soft strings intermingling with analog synth melodies, with a rare breaks spotlight kicking in before the tune's coda. Though not radically groundbreaking, Fibla's material impresses with its softly flowing rhythms and dreamy ambiance.

Eedl's attack is comparatively more aggressive and punchy, but the material is as refined as Fibla's. In Everse's dozen tracks, Duat and Angel Martinez come across as sound scientists obsessively arranging every detail into position, a case in point the occasionally funky “Spectrum” whose slower tempo allows gleaming organ lines to resonate over animated beat flurries. Despite the fact that the recipe and its ingredients are familiar—stylish beat sculpting, squiggly synth elements, and melancholy melodies carefully assembled into pristine five-minute formations—, the results appeal nonetheless, and Duat and Angel Martinez resourcefully generate wide-ranging variations from those common elements. The stately melodies and squirrelly beatscaping in “Müsli” could hold up against your prototypical Plaid track, and “Zyx” is punchy and crisp IDM that would sound perfectly at home on Spezialmaterial. Things nicely quieten as the album moves into the final laps, with “Deppart” a soft and graceful exit. Here and elsewhere, every moment counts on Eedl's nearly hour-long set.

January 2008