Review of Every Action [12k1027]

Vital Weekly (NL)

This is the third album by Chris Coode, aka Motion (who is also Reckon, with slightly different music at his hand). Motion is the perfect example, I think, of a man armed with a laptop producing finely tuned ambient glitch music. In each of the twelve tracks (the thirteenth being a remix by The Deletist) he combines the smallest sound particles, grainy, time-stretched samples that form some sort of small drone (string is a better word) and the repeated action of small residues of all of this (some would call that a loop) into twelve nicely floating pieces of music. So far so good, one says? Yes, so far so good. If this would have been my first encounter with this kind of music, say coming from an interest in ambient music, I’d be delighted. But I know Motion’s previous two albums plus I heard similar stuff before, and this makes it hard for me to be very enthusiastic about this album. After all it’s well-known musical path Motion is walking along. It has no doubt that he is a master at what he does, but I think time has come to reflect on the genre and move forward (or backward, or sideways) and expand on the sound (or limit) and make some sort of progress. If ambient glitch music is a new alienated word, then I’m sure Every Action can serve as a fine introduction, otherwise it may be a good idea to check it out first and see if it makes a profound change for you. (FdW)

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