(Sonic Arcana/Creative Vibes)

Not knowing what to expect from this album, but usually a fan of Dutch house/tech production, I have to admit this album was a somewhat disappointing collection of an ambient-electro-house hybrid. This album is well suited to a daytime café soundscape, but in terms of general listening or dancefloor possibility, it’s not going to cut it.

Aardvark – ‘Doeda’ : Chilled breaks over laidback guitar grooves and mellow piano chords. A café-style easy listener. Nicely produced and wouldn’t be out of place on a Café del Mar compiliation. Future Beat Allinace – ‘Cold Feet’: Nu-skool breaks with interesting arrangement. A warped 70s style haunting synth juxtaposes with shuffling hi-hats and toms. Again, very café soundtrack style music.

Strand – ‘Ya Dig’: Housey-breaks. Well-produced synths over spacious basslines and melody. Lacks direction but easy listening. Interesting introduction of heavy drumming near the end of the track. Stinkworx – ‘Hu Tien’: Far and away the album’s best known producer comes up with far and away the album’s strongest track – a cruisey, funky, synth-laden treat with remnants of disco. The kind of electro-funk that is so hot right now.

Dimension 5 – ‘Automation’: Sparse, haunting ambient house. Again, suited to a chilled out café soundtrack. Admittedly this theme is becoming boring by this stage of the album. Experimental synths and an irritating arrangement make this the least accessible track on the album. Optic Nerve – ‘Another Plain’: Unusual drum arrangement over slicing synths. This is a funky medium paced track with vocoded samples, which are unfortunately lyrically weak. “Our mind can see things”...hardly groundbreaking.

Deepart – ‘Gaps in the past’: Not much to say about this. See last line track 06. Dynarec – ‘Concentrated Universe’: one of the better-produced tracks though little messy. The intro goes for about ten seconds and then fades out and in again for no apparent reason. Progresses into a techy-breakbeat number. Yotoko – ‘Mad Daze’: crunchy, forgettable nu-skool breaks.

Peel Seamus – ‘FunCrusher Minus’: Label Founder Marsel Van der Wielen under the Peel Seamus moniker comes up with a somewhat confused (and confusing) interpretation of ambient house. Would be better without the harsh sample, which punctuates the track at intervals on the offbeat – a strange addition to an otherwise mellow piece. Future Beat Alliance – ‘Almost Human’: ‘Almost Human’ is ‘almost’ everything…almost house but too blippy, almost electro but too ambient, almost really good but failing to go anywhere except annoying pseudo-trendy electro depths.

Norken – ‘Fern’ – Spacey beats with ambient melody line. Lucky and Easy – ‘Blo Sum’: A weak finish of shuffling beats and piano/keyboard riffs, though laced by a pleasant (at best) melody. ‘Blo Sum’ proves to be an apt title – perfect stoners’ soundtrack.

On the whole, an inoffensive collection of ambient-electro-housey breaky hybrid, well suited to a café soundscape though probably not much else. A discrepancy in production is very noticeable; some tracks are well produced (namely 01, 04 and 08), other tracks lack direction and effective composition technique.

As the story goes, label founder ‘Peel Seamus’ sent out demo’s for years but never received a reply, thus the inception of ‘Delsin’, his own label. Unfortunately, this collection does little to dispel the nagging feeling that perhaps all those other labels-bosses had a point. There is little here to convince the listener that Peel Seamus has credibility either as a producer, or possesses album-collating capabilities, due to his below par ‘FunCrusher Minus’ and strange track selection and arrangement.

Clearly within a very particular genre, this album may appeal to quirky, blippy electro lovers, who appreciate spacious, directionless background beats with heavy helpings of melody. For everyone else, file under “kind of boring, blippy and on the whole, entirely forgettable”.