dive signals - bedrooms

Dive Signals

Bedrooms; 2013
Static Reason Recordings; 2013

4.2 out of 5

By Matt Jensen

Angel Ortega is a song-writer and performer who hides under the moniker "Dive Signals" to deliver a free-form, experimental blend of sounds: Feeling uneasy at the idea of sticking to one genre exclusively, Angel strives to color his music with influences as diverse as shoegaze, electronic, glitch, post rock and ambient, to name a few, creating a sound that is really close in nature to that of many Icelandic groups such as Sigur Ròs, Mum or Seaber. On the album Bedrooms, the quest for sounds is way more relevant than the song structure itself, as Dive Signals offers nine moody, candle-lit tracks which slowly move the record from one place to another as the flow goes on, alternating static drone landscapes with glitch-tainted electronic beats, synths and guitars producing walls of sounds (think Brian Eno!). 

Ambient-based electronics is definitely the blueprint for this album, which in a fitting comment by the artist himself, is described as a "series of experimental oriented sketches" adorned by a lo-fi production that adds to the darkness and mystic power of the compositions, making the minimal, yet accomplished arrangements even more compelling to listen to. Some songs like "Projection" find beauty in the chaos similar to how Alog did with their wonderful album Miniatures. Other songs like "10 stories" sound like what you might imagine the primordial soup of life sounded like 5 billion years ago. Tiny fluctuations flicker in and out as the song emerges. Other songs like "Minor" have an overtly ominous overtone that sound like an impending doom is present....loved it. Besides the music, the artwork deserves to be mentioned here: The beautifully painted flowers showcased on the front cover manage to fall perfectly in-line with the sounds featured on the record: Usually it's hard to mix a colorful artwork with a mellow, ambient based type of album, but the artist did a great job here, utilizing a still life portrait of various flowers to truly capture the essence of the music by Dive Signals.If you are a fan of ambient, post-rock and minimal electronics, this is definitely an album that will stay in your record player for a while!

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