Immaterial

Immaterial is somewhat the antithesis of Thomas Jirku's previously released and much-celebrated Variants album. Where that album found Jirku working with a plethora of tracks (around 60 to be exact), molding them into a full-length composite, Immaterial finds the conceptual producer working with a minimal number of tracks (only four, each around 15 minutes in length), slowly fading one into another. The idea here is to give the tracks substantial time to develop and to let the seemingly endless loops affect the listener over time. As you might presume, Immaterial takes patience. The album moves along at a snail's pace, composed of glitch-like sounds and field recordings; beats occasionally enter the mix (dub basslines in particular), but for the most part this is an ambient album much in the vein of Vladislav Delay's self-authored work and other similar ambient dub-techno producers affiliated with the Chain Reaction label, Monolake being perhaps the most obvious comparison. Though Immaterial isn't Jirku's most stunning accomplishment, it's amazing nonetheless, particularly relative to other ambient dub-techno albums that try to incorporate some glitch into the mix.