The LA beat scene isn’t running out of creative juice just yet. Teebs‘ debut album may share a few blips and blops with Lorn’s Nothing Else, but this is not just another Brainfeeder release. The imprint is diverse within the niche it’s been exploring for some time, and here we have a fresh injection of both artist and palette. Where Lorn’s debut was dense and industrially knocking electronic music, Ardour is a spacious, light and—above all—blank canvas, on which Teebs has had a field day. If you’re more inclined to tunes that float and weave into each other without a clear beginning or end than hammered rhythms, this one would be the record for you.

While it is true that this album does drift from time to time, it doesn’t really go as haywire as you’d expect some of the label’s other artists to (say, Flying Lotus or Daedelus). If these are dreams, they’re structured dreams; even the most transcendental bells on ‘Arthur’s Birds‘ follow some sort of pattern. These are still beats, regardless of the obscurity of their components. That’s actually one of the neat things about Ardour; the sounds are harmonious, often prolongued, and generally more sustained than on a lot of electronic releases. The samples have arrived from left and right—anything from breezes, snaps and singing birds to chimes and the occasional static goes—but we still get a sense that at the bottom of it all, there is a set rhythm, a grid, an MPC.

Like most of the record, ‘While You Doooo‘ uses spared but impressive percussion, with the broken rhythm juxtaposed to a harp for a short respite. ‘Moments‘ has some swelling synths that overflow and wind down completely after two and a half minutes. Textured treble is as abundant as euphoric ringing on the record, which combines the finest aspects of beatmaking with a rare attentiveness to sound. With its skewed blips, final track ‘Autumn Antique‘ is almost an anomaly, had it not been for the soothing flutes that remind us, again, that we are inhabiting bliss as designed by Teebs. I expected the beat scene to have stopped exciting at this point.

Words Sven Carlsson
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