Bleep

Ryan Lee West, under his Rival Consoles moniker, brings his plaintive analogue music to contemporary classical label Erased Tapes on ‘Odyssey’. Though label-mates like Olafur Arnald and Nils Fram have tended to pursue a sound driven by acoustic instrumental performance, supplemented by subtle electronics, West uses only a simple analogue set-up but achieves a similarly minimal and quasi-spiritual atmosphere which explains his presence on the label. The title track is dominated by silky ticking percussion and the simplest of cycling sine chords, while ‘Voyager’ is full of the kind of wide-eyed bleeping cascades and crisp claps which can’t help but bring a smile to the face. With the inclusion of a remix by composer Peter Broderick, this is an interesting re-contextualisation of this label’s defining principles.