Deepchord Presents: Echospace Liumin

'Deepchod Presents Echospace' is the collaborative project of Rod Modell and Steve Hitchell, two veteran producers based in Chicago and Detroit, now returning for a second full album for the Modern Love label. In the years that have passed both artists have been busy with numerous projects, developing their own Echospace imprint and recording under a number of different guises. Modell in particular has developed his longstanding fascination with location recordings, and some made in Tokyo over the last couple of years provided the source material for what would eventually become this new album. Indeed, a bonus CD that comes with the first pressing of the CD features 80 minutes of these original field recordings. Although the vapor trails of dub still colour the essence of much of this new material, 'Liumin' is an altogether more 'destroyed' experience than its predecessor, opening with the washed-out, beatless sequence of 'In Echospace', a track that somehow manages to harness the disorientating experience of being a stranger in a strange land, with only the flickering glow of neon lights for company. The album unfurls with stretches of immersive techno and low-end treatments compressed with a growling, unstable focus that's in turn oppressive and soothing, re-creating the uniquely ambiguous euphoria/narcosis that comes with extended sleep deprivation. It's an effect that's perhaps encapsulated best on 'BCN Dub', a heaving warehouse thump that's entwined with shortwave radio transmissions bringing to life a disembodied horn-section from deep in the ether. There may well be some connection to dub lurking deep in the foggy mists of these recordings - but 'Liumin' inhabits far more opaque and unsettling terrain to anything you may have heard from both this project, or any of its many imitators.