This is one of those records one could easily overlook – or overhear. All the more so if the project Entidad Animada from Buenos Aires has so far meant nothing to you. And yet even the cover, with its photograph of cacti, has something appealing about it in a slightly odd way. Much the same can be said of the music.
What unfolds across these six pieces over a good half hour has a great deal in common with the frictionless drifting of ambient. But it is better not to use it as an opportunity for inward box-ticking. For although the sounds present themselves as welcoming, meeting the ear as slightly inward-turning synthesiser melodies with a moderate overtone design, this approach ultimately proves far more adventurous than its ingredients at first suggest, despite the relatively low threshold of access.
Entidad Animada builds these sonic experiments in broadly open form, yet also leaves room for divergent details that seem less clearly aligned with the concept. Drones whose otherwise resting frequencies slip out now and then, or tones that occasionally step out of line as glissandi. This is not a spectacular performance, but a quietly, amiably disorienting one. Curiosity, for that very reason, is rewarded all the more.
