Vibrant Forms II

With each of his Chain Reaction EPs, Fluxion became both increasingly minimal and reliant upon dub-style distortion techniques to bring beauty to the sparse sounds. Where the earlier recordings captured on his Vibrant Forms album found the artist crafting what seemed like ambient techno (while still retaining a dancefloor-style sense of rhythm), his latter recordings compiled here — along with a handful of previously unreleased tracks on disc one — show few signs of any dancefloor tendencies. The high-hats suddenly are nowhere to be found, the basslines have become languid, and the songs now rely upon indolent distortion techniques to color what are really little more than simple rhythmic patterns beneath the clouds of darkness and surreal sensation. The music compiled on Vibrant Forms II — taken primarily from the Prospect and Bipolar Defect EPs — is nearly torturous in its mesmerizing simplicity. The slow-cycling loops lull the senses while the waves of tweaked tone feel dark and haunting. After listening to Fluxion's preceding work on Vibrant Forms, one finds this album to be even more striking, and discerns how his music steadily decomposes to minimal glimmer and continually slows down its tempo to a lumbering lull over time. Furthermore, the music on Vibrant Forms II becomes increasingly disorientating — as well as deconstructed — making it much more difficult to stomach yet also more effective in its alien evocation.