“Workaround 2” by Beatrice Dillon

“Workaround 2” is the perfect soundtrack for a day – 29 February – that only exists once every 4 years. It’s from the first album by UK electronic music producer Beatrice Dillon, and it’s an album that blurs boundaries and stylistic conventions and exists in it’s own time-zone.

There seems to be a bit of genre-warping-everything about this unpredictable and ever-shifting combination of rhythmically-uplifting beats, UK club music (techno/ house), electronica, Afro-Caribbean jazz, experimental avant-garde, and musique-concrete.

There’s elements here in “Workaround 2” – with its disembodied vocal from Laurel Halo – that seem similar in approach to the “Fourth World” style of Jon Hassell (especially the recently re-issued “Flash of the Spirit” album with Farafina) but Dillon’s creations are light of touch and full of space to allow the tension and interplay between elements work.

‘Sunflower’ 7″ by Christopher El’ Truento

Here’s my New Zealand Music month Bandcamp purchase for 6 May. Something a bit different to the music I usually champion.

Christopher El’ Truento is a producer and beatmaker for the likes of @peace and Home Brew. But the music he releases under his own name tends more towards drifting and abstract ever-morphing space-jazz constructions like these two songs released as a 7″ on Japanese label Wonderful Noise.

El’ Truento cites the quieter sounds of jazz icons like Alice Coltrane as an influence on his solo work. But I also hear something in these miniature soundscapes that reminds me of the muted exotic sounds and percussion loops on ‘Possible Worlds’ by Brian Eno/ Jon Hassell