Christoph El’ Truento

Wow! There’s still so much to unpack from last year’s wonderful Series of Oopsie Dasies and Various Other Flora – and here we a new EP from the very talented beatmaker/producer/conceptualist Christoph El’ Truento. As well as “stacking blocks” for/with @Peace and Home Brew and Some Other Planets he has his own thing going on. And this new 5-tracker kicks off with the spacey/sci-fi title track – a hark back to last year’s album, in a sense. But still a new beginning. You can draw the line back to the Flying Lotus school of capsule beat-making, sure. But Truento has his voice – and that voice is becoming very clear now.

It’s the middle of this EP where things get very interesting – where the beatmaker happily goes beatless – and where we start to hear New Zealand’s next great film score composer. Well, that’s if he wants – of course. But it’s certainly what I hear. The haunting, crepuscular Broken Mirrors would be just right for lurching documentary footage – or suspenseful narrative fiction. And It Could Go Either Way returns the beat, but it’s more a case of the Aphex Twin-styled tinkering, ambient skirmishes – and the beat falls away, is discarded.

The lengthy Realignment (seven and a half minutes) is an astonishing set of sounds – almost claustrophobic in its intent, brutally, beautifully calculated/calibrated before the EP’s closing track, Let Your Dependencies Dance, features live drums and percussion to propel it towards a version of dance music. It all sits together nicely but it’s the stuff in the middle that shows the change – that hints at where the heart of Truento’s music lies now. A murky, gloomy darkness pervades. And it’s as much about a dark ambient flavour as it is – and ever was – about a beat, broken or otherwise.

He’s very clever.