Dot Edit Dot - You Are Alone

Released: May 4

This new album from Dot Edit Edit is a bit of a departure from what I had previously heard on last year's We Are Not Angels. Where the latter was a lot more downtempo and ambient, You Are Alone dives headlong int the territory of techno-centric rhythms and some unexpectedly psychedelic sounding synth lines. Of course it isn't all just straight up techno four on the floor beats. Dot Edit Dot takes a few opportunities throughout the album to sprinkle in some more abstract tracks that dive into some ambient and experimental territory like on "Heat Haze" and "Be Quiet Now, It's All Done," the second of which is a wonderfully apt name for the final track.

So the album starts out with "You Are Dreaming," which feels decidedly tech-influenced but has certain feature that remind me a lot of the earlier days of psytrance including some weird little whisper quiet vocals bouncing around in my headphones and some gated arpeggios that call back wonderfully to artists like Astral Projection and Hallucinogen. I'm not sure if that's what he was going for here but it works extremely well. The next track takes thing in a bit different direction as it doesn't really resemble much else I can readily think of but it has this odd kind of shuffle in the rhythm that I can't quite place, but there's still some seemingly leftover touches of psychedelia that I definitely appreciate. Later on in the album he pulls off a similar vibe in "Shade" but ties it back in to a more readily recognizable techno rhythm near the end. 

At the end of this album, Dot Edit Dot drops any need for solid rhythms and takes us out on an ambient note. Not just a series of long pads and textures though - he ties in a number of the psytrance callbacks into this track to great effect. There's the continual arpeggios playing through the track, although they have been quite slowed for this piece, and a small collection of seemingly percussive sounds meant to provide something akin to a rhythm but it never fully materializes into a proper beat. It puts the whole album in a peculiar context as it all feels so vaguely hallucinogenic, almost as if it is not entirely real. Regardless of whether this was the intended effect or not, it definitely resonated with me.