What turns an album of adventurous club music into a good album of adventurous club music? After all, there is no shortage of producers willing to cross boundaries and ignore conventions. Far from everything they make manages to hold the listener’s attention and – not least – keep them dancing.
There had not been all that much to hear from Brian Close before this, and this is his first album under the double-edged name B. Close. Which very neatly captures what he is doing across these characteristically extended six tracks, most of them running to six minutes or more. The sense of proximity he creates lies in details such as the harmonies of his synthesisers, which for all their abrasiveness and roughness radiate a kind of inner warmth – something paradoxically heightened by the insistently syncopated beats.
The album opens with heavily distorted sounds; one might assume furious electronic noise, but that is merely the outermost layer that has to be passed through before arriving at a blend in which variably held Morse-code rhythms meet machine sounds whose battered quality at times recalls post-industrial of the 1980s, heard distantly through the various veils that B. Close lays across everything with his manipulations, while repeatedly allowing moments of damaged beauty. Nostalgia, yes – but not a backward-looking one; rather, a building block from which things lurch forwards. In B. Chamber (Stratum A), one feels estranged and entirely at home at the same time.
