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It’s been nine long years since Dylan Nathan’s first album, the delay partly due to the leaking on to the internet of a draft version of his 2003 album. He responded to the betrayal by returning to the drawing board and re-writing large chunks of the material so I guess you could say this album was actually only 6 years in the making but it was worth the wait.

Variance Part 1 is the light in Dylan Nathan’s musical world, all optimism, sunshine, smiles and lazy days. Kicking us off is ‘Soulflute’ with it’s uptempo soulful drums, layered with muted rap, cosmic harp, spectral female vocals, electronic bleeps and whirs, and yes, some soulful flute as well. It’s a warm welcome to the musical delights to come.

‘Anitphon’ darkens the mood slightly but keeps things mellow despite the menacing bass line. Soulful vocal snippets are triggered and released quickly whilst some pleasing keys add a nice counter to the bottom end darkness and beat programming trickery.

The rest of Variance 1 veers between semi-ambient floaters and potential Balearic sunset soundtracks, more often than not with a soulful drum backbone anchoring the space bound pads floating and swirling in the tracks outer reaches as melodic keys add pleasant structure to these multi-layered soundscapes.

Variance 2 is an altogether different kettle of fish as we are led into the dark side of Jega’s world by a beguiling and seductive electro-acoustic snippet before ‘Shibuya’ comes along and throws a bucket of cold water over the warm Ibiza sunset moments with it’s dubstep rhythm and unsettling electro horror keys.

The journey into darkness continues with the deep space suspense of ‘Cascade Decoherence’, the rave noir banger ‘Aerodynamic’, the intense frenetic electro percussive lazer space battle of ‘Latin Hypercube’ and just in case you hadn’t started sweating Jega then hits you over the head with the hyper speed sonic assault of ‘Hydrodynamic’.

Personally I’m all about the first half of the album but I guess that’s just because I’m getting too old for dark IDM rave ups but there’s no denying the quality of production throughout.

Links:
Jega Website
Planet Mu Website