- OOBE—that stands for Out Of Body Experience—had one of the most unusual releases on Opal Tapes of last year with SFTCR. The brief but arresting album traded the label's crumbling house and hissing drones for big, cresting waves of sound that hid big-room melodies beneath all the fuzz. Now, with a release on another ascendant tape label, 1080p Collection, Yari Malaspina lets those melodies take centre stage and rockets himself to new, cosmic heights.
From the opening minutes of "Intro," Digitalisea leaves you feeling adrift: the melodies are viscous, and when there are rhythms, they're almost never propulsive. There's an obvious debt to Actress on the rough frequencies of "166.166.166" (which sound like they were scrubbed with a nail file) and on the submerged disco of "Purplehaze." But OOBE usually embellishes that blueprint rather than just copying it. Much of Digitalisea has a space-age sense of wonder and possibility: the intertwining synths of "Radiation" feel like they go on forever, somewhere between some lost German synth record, a low-budget sci-fi film score and a mid-'90s progressive house interlude.
It's in the final section of Digitalisea that Malaspina really proves his growth as a producer. "Lightblue" takes a synth motif as overdriven and ridiculous as any trance anthem and forces it to merely billow in suspension. On "Digital Sea," he lets big surges of melody crash and ebb into near-silence, underlining the desolate atmosphere that haunts the whole album. Both tracks smudge familiar sounds until they're nearly unrecognizable, which is a signature of Malaspina's method—he doesn't so much deconstruct genres as implode them and work with the wreckage.
Tracklist01. Intro
02. Radiation
03. 166.166.166
04. Deep Space Lovers
05. Purplehaze
06. Disco From Wolf#359
07. Lightblue
08. Digital Sea
09. Morse From Europa
10. Stardust
11. Stardust#2