Bleep

Love + Light makes hay with both sides of the Daniel Avery unique aesthetic. This is a record which finds club-demolishing techno sounds softened by deft textural work, one where dreamy atmospherics are given a pulse by gentle yet insistent drum programming.

Acid inflections and thunderous techno stomps drive Love + Light forward at points. Take the second track ‘Dusting For Smoke’, for instance, a high-octane banger powered by a ten-tonne kick drum. Furthermore, the combination of grainy hauntology meeting rave atmospherics and dawn-chorus keyboard timbres that were found on previous Avery LPs like Song For Alpha remain here - indeed, these are the sounds which heighten the smoggy beauty of dub-techno joints such as ‘Dream Distortion’ and ‘Darlinnn’.

More textural tones come to dictate proceedings as Love + Light wears on. At times the record is spun out into halcyon-glow ambient-techno numbers - some of the tracks towards the end of the record have a gorgeous, gauzy quality about them. Elsewhere Avery supercharges his synthetic pads to create skyscraping textures pitched somewhere between ambient, shoegaze and power electronics - see ‘After The Fire’ on this count.

Love + Light is a record which takes in both Daniel Avery’s club-ready output and his more contemplative, ambient-adjacent work. The results are dynamic, ambitious and frequently very beautiful.