None For The Crow by Dustmotes is a gorgeous ep: a spacious layering of lovely sounds at the incredibly organic end of electronic music.
What especially gripped me was the wonderful use of negative space.
Drilling a beat through to a listeners core is usually desirable, the simplest way to add emphasis being to just turn up the volume. What Dustmotes does is far subtler, having impact not by hitting me over the head but by dropping me into the beat.
Everything is drenched in static, an electric fog across the whole ep. The impact arrives with a momentary drop through the static to a beat at the bottom. Sort of the opposite of the usual percussive, brief burst of white noise. It’s a technique used across the ep, perhaps most effectively on In Here, combining with handclaps to pull along a drifting ambient space. I find the idea of anti-beats hidden in noise incredibly appealing, and happily they’re used here as part of a beautiful overall effect.
I first heard Dustmotes working with Texture, which along with things that aren’t there leads us nicely to tomorrow…
