(Merck/Couchblip!)

‘Bye Bye Gridlock Traffic’ is the debut full-length release from Holland-based producer Lennard Van Der Last, whose released output to date has been previously restricted to a single remix for Machine Drum on his 2002 album ‘Half the Battle.’

Van Der Last certainly proves that he’s more than up to the full-album challenge, as ‘Bye Bye Gridlock Traffic’ is a strikingly diverse and considered work that easily stands alongside recent productions from more famous names. Opening with ringing harmonics and plucked string sounds as well as a sampled thunderstorm, ‘Ballroom Arcade’ slowly brings the album into focus before an inexplicably eerie sample of George McFly’s unsettling laughter brings things down into the brooding and ambient synthesised strings of ‘Big Day Out.’

‘Hotel’ introduces delayed Brian Eno-esque piano chords laid over a shifting backdrop of white noise that’s still strangely calming, before glacial bass tones and arcade game bleeps glide the track to its conclusion. ‘Crave & Fall’ is an epic 10 minute long dubbed-out minimalist ‘clicks and cuts’ voyage that’s reminiscent in parts of early Yellow-album period Pole (but with vocoders!), while ‘Depart & Arrive’ forms the album’s exquisite centrepiece as an incredible Cinematic Orchestra-esque interlude, with all the space around the instruments filled with the sound of car tyres passing in the rain and radio broadcasts between the space module and ground control.

‘Unbound’ is an ambient walk through a major metropolitan airport that sounds like it was initially constructed by actually walking through said facility with a Minidisc recorder, and then re-constructed in the studio as an eerie cinematic suite, complete with echoing footsteps and the distant sound of children that ends in mournful strings. ‘Greetings Twinsunian’, meanwhile brings in sampled turntable scratches over a blissful hiphop instrumental backdrop that builds into what sounds almost like a swaggering movie score.

Title track ‘Bye Bye Gridlock Traffic’ injects a bit of mashed up dnb bpm into the equation, riding over a chord sequence that sounds like it could have easily come from either vintage Jarre or a Nintendo game, while ‘Say I Say No’ and ‘Age Tandems’ bring the album to an atmospheric close, the latter being a 13 minute epic closer filled with ambient tones and sampled radio callback voices

‘Bye Bye Gridlock Traffic’ is a debut album that definitely displays a lot of ambition and a desire to genre hop, and this goal is conducted with extreme dexterity – throughout there’s never a moment where Van Der Last seems out of his depth. There’s a discernible recurring theme of spooky sampled childrens’ voices a la Boards of Canada emanating throughout ‘Bye Bye Gridlock Traffic’ as well, which adds to the slightly dark flavour.

If you enjoyed recent works by Susumu Yokota, Scanner or Brian Eno (in particular some of his early work with pianist Harold Budd such as The Plateaux of Mirror), you’ll want to check this out. Don’t forget to pack headphones as well – this is one of the best atmospheric soundtracks for the brain to emerge in the last year.

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