Released: 14/10/22
Ryan Lee West aka Rival Consoles releases his highly anticipated new album Articulation, released on Erased Tapes. Articulation, the lead track and album centrepiece, links the record back to the analogue fluidity and colour of 2016’s Night Melody. The division of varying time signatures, intertwined with a complex structure of notes, creates an expression of a moving structure and conjures a dreamy motorik energy.
The idea of using analogue drawings and tools to bolster digital creations can be heard in the structure of the pieces that make up Articulation from the broody techno opener Vibrations on a String all the way to the album’s boundless closer Sudden Awareness of Now. While the anthemic rise and fall of Still Here and the beatless ambient meditation Melodica evoke a certain nostalgia, Forwardism achieves the very opposite by burying its melody within the fast-paced rhythm of its pulsating synths. Rising out of birdsong heard from his studio window, Sudden Awareness of Now has a particular urgency about it and seems to perfectly capture a longing for escape. Built around a simple and repetitive melodic theme, expanding and retracting over the course of its seven-minute odyssey.