Enter/Tarot - Taroko

 

Released: November 3

Taroko is a rather enigmatic little album that integrates a number of different influences and techniques. We get everything from trip-hop influenced beats with spacey sounds to odd little dirges that feature that most abstract of sounds wrapped around minimal rhythms. It’s quite a feat to jam all of this variation into a six track album that barely touches the twenty minute mark but Athens-based artist Enter/Tarot pulls it off quite effectively and beautifully.

Hitting some of my favorite moments on the album, I want to start in the middle with “Wild Wave.” This track caught my ear because of how purely trippy it is with its minimalist rhythm and use of broken little pieces of vocals throughout. These vocals start off being gently melodic but as the track progresses, things around it get weirder until virtually everything drops out and we get an ominous laughter that it chopped and broken up into delightful little ear candy. Much of the album retains a similarly slower tempo to this track, except until we get to the end. The final track, “Snoring in a Camping Tent,” breaks with this calmer vibe and give us something with a live breakbeat style rhythm (the very live sounding drums make the vibe perfect on this track) with a melody played out on something kind of like a horn as the sounds of glass breaking bring in some more of those delightfully weird vocal clips. Overall, it’s a fun little album that makes for a fun treat for the ears and is the perfect amount of odd.