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Following the success of his enigmatic singles "Seeing Through Shadows" for Minus and “Flight LB 7475” for Ovum,
Düsseldorf's Loco Dice returns with a monster four-track, co-produced with Hannover's Martin Buttrich, the man behind
one of this fall's biggest hits-"Full Clip," released on Carl Craig's Planet E.
The four cuts on this doublepack EP are monsters all, between eight and 13 minutes apiece. Coming hot on the heels of
similarly sprawling releases from Ricardo Villalobos and Luciano & Thomas Melchior, they confirm Cadenza's
commitment to stretching electronic dance music's form to fit a more expansive frame.
These are anthems, but they're anthems of a different sort. While too many hits beat their riffs like dead horses and treat
their listeners little better, Loco Dice turns their attentions to gauzier, wispier elements: ghost melodies, feathery
percussion, iridescent timbres that flash once and are gone. These are tracks for clubbers who like their bumping
subtle; they're cuts for headphone listeners who want to follow a corkscrewed groove until the g-force tugs their lips
into a private smile. The four tracks sound simple at first-easygoing house rhythms, skeletal melodies, agreeable
sounds and textures-but the more you listen, the deeper they get, multiplying their inner dimensions exponentially.
"Raindrops On My Window," opening with clopping hooves and twittering birdcalls, feels like a journey through the
forest back to civilization: a male voice mutters monosyllables, a female singer wails a near-Eastern lament, and the
track's taut machine rhythms box in an unruly bassline that cuts corners with every bar, refusing to slot itself in 4s. The
whole thing is dead simple, unabashedly dark, and delectably funky.
"Paradiso" is one of the gentlest tracks you'll hear this year, braiding keening keyboard lines and unfolding like a
flower caught by time-lapse photography. Romantic melodies meet Afro-Latin polyrhythms; Steve Reich learns to jack.
No tearjerker has ever waved its handkerchief so seductively. (The track also something of a historical curiosity: with its
chiming arpeggios and endless rotations, "Paradiso" provides the missing link between the music box and the
turntable.)
Opening with agile woodblock melodies and fleeting scraps of woodwinds, "Vamos a Cali" hunkers down for the home
stretch. Pastoral melodies twine themselves around a clean-lined lattice of clicks and hissing hi-hats; for the first five
minutes, the whole thing is so delicate you'd barely know it's there. But as the song rolls on it fills out and tightens its
hypnotic grasp, layering loops in four dimensions and ballooning classic minimal techno into something billowy; as it
drifts higher and higher, its 13 minutes feel like an infinity.
They almost are: "A Chico a Rhytmico" reworks "Vamos a Cali" for a tougher crowd; those same harps and bells are
here, plucking and pinging, but this time the beat is more pronounced, the finely tuned metallic percussion more
insistent. This is no time to be sensitive; it's time to lean into the syncopations, slide with the low-riding bassline, and
revel in the opulence of the spongy chords and silvery leads. It's honest-to-goodness hands-in-the-air time, no matter
what the clock says, nor where the moon (or sun) is in the sky.
What all four cuts have in common is that they're all as strong-and as smooth-as silk. That Loco Dice should come up
with four new anthems is no surprise, but no one expected him to do this. He has taken house and techno to a place
rarely visited in dance music: a zone where tenderness and force become one.
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