Pridon: Apnea Eina
Low Impedance

Three years in the making, Apnea Eina is Pridon's (aka Petros Voudouris) accomplished follow-up to Health Food Scroll, his debut album on Fluxion's Vibrant Music imprint, and his Low Impedance EP New Steine. The Greece-by-way-of-Brighton Voudouris proves himself to be a polished practitioner and a man of many stylistic colours on the new fifty-minute collection. On “She Bit Me First,” he offers slow-motion, faintly hip-hop-inflected grooves that wouldn't sound out of place on Geogaddi, but his material extends beyond a single style. The synth asteroids that careen through “Flask Bordon” bring a spacey dimension to the album while the springy swing of “Sunk” offers an ear-catching blend of minimal techno and African high-life. In fact, most tracks are hybrid in nature in that each one fuses two or three styles into something unusual. “Here Be Dragons” presents a smoothly flowing mix of trip-hop, funk, and IDM, the Afro-house-IDM hybrid “False Schematics” is so feverish in its percussive intensity it could be labeled Dionysian, “Who Are You?” traffics in bass-heavy IDM-funk, and elsewhere elements of dancehall, ambient, dub, and Autechrean snarl surface too. If such diversity makes pinning Pridon down to a cohesive style a challenging proposition, at the very least Apnea Eina is never less than interesting in its scenic variety.

April 2008