Articles
2010 Top 10s and 20s
Will Long (Celer)

Albums
Bilxaboy
Jefre Cantu-Ledesma
Celer & Yui Onodera
Cepia
Dead Leaf Echo
Ferraris & Uggeri
Ernesto Ferreyra
Flying Horseman
The Foreign Exchange
Les Fragments de la Nuit
Ghost and Tape
Andrew Hargreaves
Head Of Wantastiquet
i8u
Anders Ilar
Quintana Jacobsma
Kaiserdisco
Leafcutter John
Clem Leek
The Lickets
The Machine
Magda
My Fun
Ostendorf, Zoubek, Lauzier
Part Timer
Phillips + Hara
RV Paintings
Set In Sand
Shackleton
Shigeto
Matt Shoemaker
Sun City Girls
Supersilent
Swartz
Ben Swire
Collin Thomas
Tomo
Upward Arrows

Compilations / Mixes
Exp. Dance Breaks 36
Fünf
Lee Jones
The Moon Comes Closer
Note of Seconds
Tensnake

EPs
8Bitch
Celer
Jasper TX
Jozif
Lerosa
Machinefabriek
Patscan
Pleq
Simon Scott
SHEMALE
Thorsten Soltau / Weiss
Jace Syntax & BlackJack
Weiss

Set In Sand: Return
Symbolic Interaction / Abandon Building Recordings

Merry melodies and sing-song themes abound in Set In Sand's aptly titled Return, which apparently was created mostly from samples of a music box. Given their source of origin, it hardly surprises that the album's melodies chime brightly, though some of them do sound as if they're being voiced by a thumb piano (production sleight-of-hand no doubt). Crunchy hip-hop beats and the click and squiggle of electronic sounds rub shoulders in the Denver, Colorado producer's latest foray into kaleidoscopic IDM. Imagine delicate Lullatone melodies and shredded beats mashed into three-minute scenes and you've got a pretty good idea of how Return sounds. While much of the material is buoyant in feel and light-hearted in spirit, there is an occasional ‘serious' moment, and Set In Sand even indulges in some ambient soundscaping during the opening and closing tracks too. “An Allegory of an Example” adopts a slightly more sober tone by unspooling more slowly and focusing on the melancholy side of things, even if beats jitter and shudder here as much as they do elsewhere, while the even slower “Returning to Being” weaves its pretty melodies into a stately march procession. Return might be succinctly described as eleven tracks of head-bobbing beats, tinkling melodies, and playful clank and whirr with all of it served up in an efficient forty-two-minute running time.

December 2010