Dang-Khoa Chau feels comfortable in murky waters. Or at least he loves the ambiguous, the not-to-be-grasped, the inconclusive and the ambiguities. When the Paris-based producer calls his third solo album »Live At The Edge«, there’s more to it than just the hint that the LP, released over 12th Isle, depicts a gig at a Seoul club called The Edge. The title is to be understood as an instruction for action: Live at the limit, dance on the fine line between one world and the other. After all, that’s what the Frenchman does, too. On six untitled tracks, Chau pushes bulbous rhythms and billowing sound surfaces on top of each other as if they were memory stones that don’t always fit together, but which nevertheless form a round overall picture. »Live At The Edge« scurries, trickles, chugs, taps and drifts along, seamlessly and yet always against the grain. For as deeply relaxed as this music is, it is surrounded by a clear melancholy. It reminds of emo-ambient masters like Gigi Masin even when Don’t-DJ-like meta-ethno rhythms set the beat. Even though the grooves get tighter towards the end of this brilliant set and the mood brightens up steadily, »Live At The Edge« is still an introspective affair. The tightrope walk, to which Chau implicitly calls his audience, has more than one dimension. Accordingly unclear, hard to grasp and ambiguous is his sound. That is what makes him so fascinating.
Live At The Edge
