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Blood Room, "Chroma and Coda"
Blood Room has only a handful of releases under that moniker, but the sound of Chroma and Coda is that of a confident, self-assured electronic artist. Hints of the early 1990s and the dawn of techno appear throughout, but with an appropriately dissonant, experimental bent to keep it sounding fresh and contemporary.
Duality places a notable role throughout the eight songs on this tape.Blood Room builds most of these songs from conventional rhythms and melodies, but never in an expected way.Instead, he blends those expected moments with bizarre, processed noises and random bits of sound.The relaxed kick drum lead rhythm of "Rite in the Rain" (a collaboration with SOLO1) is treated with just the right amount of distortion and processing to keep it from sounding too conventional.Hints of melody glide through but only fleetingly, and everything has a satisfying analog crunch to it.
"Colourism" is similar, though with a more erratic, but cleaner rhythm program driving it.It has a similar combination of conventional pacing, but mixed with weird synth outbursts and strange processing to give it an entirely different edge."Sapir" thuds away with a 4/4 bass drum rhythm, but bathes everything in a nice variety of reverbs, and mixes cleaner melodic leads with bits of chaos and static to excellent effect.
The stranger moments are frequent as well.Blood Room strips down to bare essentials on "Alfven," with a light synth lead coupled with a rhythm that sounds as if it were constructed with the tiniest fragments of human voice.For all its odd instrumentation, it is a surprisingly relaxed piece."Steen" may be the tape's highpoint for me, however.Skittering noises, big beats, and dark synthesizer work form the foundation that bizarre sounds are cast atop, coming together as a taut, strongly composed piece of music that is wonderfully unconventional, but still has a great memorable rhythm to it.
Blood Room's sound may be influenced by those early days of techno and its variety of offshoots, but their unconventional approach to the sounds and how they are mixed is what gives the Chroma and Coda a distinct identity.There might not be big danceable beats, but it is the obtuseness that makes this an excellent work.
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