For fans of: Aphex Twin, Jon Hopkins, Max Cooper, Floating Points.
London-based producer Rival Consoles has returned with Landscape from Memory, a quietly exploratory addition to his increasingly introspective body of work. With a career spanning nearly two decades, he has modestly carved out a reputation as one of electronic music’s most thoughtful craftsmen, bridging the emotional depth of acoustic composition with the precision of synthesis. While his previous album, Now Is, embraced acoustic textures and ambient minimalism, this latest outing – as the title suggests – feels more fragmented and pieced together from a labyrinth of elusive impressions; more bewitched than ever with texture and atmosphere over immediacy or hooks.
‘In Reverse’ – arguably one of the LP’s strongest tracks – opens the album with delicately warped, plaintive synths, soft guitar gestures, and shuffling percussive elements that evoke an ineffable emotional vastness with their soft movements. The track sets a tone of hushed melancholy that lingers like mist throughout the project. ‘Catherine’, a tribute to West’s partner, offers one of the album’s most accessible moments, folding playful melodies into gentle two-step rhythms, slipping seamlessly into a thrumming bass-led groove halfway through the song – a nuanced but rewarding listen.
‘Drum Song’’s title hints at percussive heft but ultimately delivers a slightly sparse clatter of bass hits and scattered clicks – but, it does endow a similar sort of enjoyability to its predecessor, with a light four-on-the floor and playful synths that are easy to tap one’s foot to. ‘Known Shape’ embarks on a bit more of a percussive voyage with thumping kicks, pinging pads and stuttering rhythms. ‘In a Trance’ feels somewhat slight, ricocheting between ambience and Eurotrance-inflected beats with little memorable impact.
‘Jupiter’ and ‘Coda’ are more suited to the dancefloor, but possess a distinct air of introversion. The former is replete with richly-saturated textures and resonant organic percussion, while the latter has a pleasing progression of warped synths swirling around skittering percussion that coalesce into a (relatively) driving groove. While the album’s more percussive tracks are danceable, they are cloaked in a cerebral quality that sometimes feels beyond reach.
Elsewhere, West veers into ambient abstraction – in varying forms.
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‘Gaivotas’ brings a brighter energy, its shimmering synths and minimal percussion evoking heat-haze atmospheres and sunlit skies. ‘Soft Gradient Beckons’ strips things back, floating on airy synths and looping alarm tones splintering under subtle distortion, with gossamer pulses but no beats to anchor it. ‘2 Forms’ sees quivering synths shape-shift through light and dark with intricate intensity. ‘Nocturne’ offers one of the album’s most exquisite synth sequences, glowing with an ethereal optimism that is heavenly yet not grandiose.
These beatless passages are where Landscape from Memory feels like it is soaring, where West masterfully wields space and tone to take precedence over momentum.
There is a serenely lo-fi quality to the downbeat ‘If Not Now’, crackling gently with analogue warmth and subdued yet complex rhythms. ‘Tape Loop’ provides a hazy yet soothing palette cleanser as the penultimate track, readying the listener for the titular closer ‘Landscape from Memory’, which revisits the album’s ambient preoccupations with gentle drones, quietly towering synths suffused in reverb, and soft-focus bass, bringing the project to a muted, reflective close.
As ever, West’s sound design is meticulous. Synth tones blur into one another with painterly care, rhythms appear and dissolve without fanfare, and even the album’s more restless moments feel considered. Yet Landscape from Memory is less immediate than some of Rival Consoles’ earlier work; it lingers at the edges rather than pushing one’s attention to the fore. For longtime fans or ambient IDM veterans, there is certainly subtle pleasure to be found in its reticence, but newcomers may find themselves searching for something more direct to hold onto.
