Glass City Sessions

Following on from Dimensional Space on Echospace (CV313 001CD, 313 004CD), dub techno legend CV313, aka Stephen Hitchell, offers up his second album, Glass City Sessions on Minimood, featuring five profoundly immersive tracks that come as a double vinyl release only. CV313's signature dub techno sound has been a blueprint for the genre and is created on vintage hardware; all sounds, static, tones, and paranormal occurrences are left in to render it as atmospheric as it is. The five expansive recordings that make up the album are actually based on live recordings from a DEMF after-show night back in 2000 in Detroit. "The music is a bit creepy and so was the experience of this live show," says Stephen Hitchell. "It was an old dingy warehouse about ten miles out of downtown Detroit, right next to the now abandoned Eloise asylum, but there are many stories of it still being haunted." Indeed, that theme of haunted locations around Detroit echoes through the five tracks and makes them a truly cinematic experience. Opening things up on the first record is the brilliantly dark "Belle Isle Symphonics", twelve frosty minutes of hunched-over drums and rattling metal sounds that place you in the center of a large abandoned building. "Masonic Mystic" is much sparser and more eerie, with watery chords and warm static suspending you in an unsettling calm atmosphere, but one that always feel like something strange is around the corner. On the second record the superb "Stars Above Elmwood" lifts the shadowy mood somewhat with more airy dub techno drums and pensive chords rippling out in all directions. It's warm, expansive, and utterly absorbing for more than 13 minutes. "Two Way Inn" continues the trip in fine style with gentle chords and barely there drums, comforting white noise and distant pads all sinking you into a state of meditation before the masterful "Eloise's Theme" arrives, an ambient-ish masterpiece with horizontal chords gently moving up-and-down the scales to trap you in a soothing state, but always with an undercurrent of foreboding. This new album by CV313 is deep, storytelling dub techno of the highest order. Comes on splatter vinyl.