Neu Gestalt – Inside The Rain Chamber

Album Review by Simon Jay Catling | 25 Nov 2014
Album title: Inside The Rain Chamber
Artist: Neu Gestalt
Label: Alex Tronic Records
Release date: 5 Dec

For Neu Gestalt’s third record, he found inspiration in recalling a year-long stay in Singapore, where his Uncle was stationed with the RAF, and in classic sci-fi thriller Blade Runner’s subtle orientalist aesthetic. Subsequently, the Edinburgh-based producer spent hours on hours cutting up and re-configuring Far Eastern language samples to create a new, highly evocative yet ultimately wordless language that drifts in and out Inside The Rain Chamber’s spatial beat-shy electronica.

Unfortunately such micro-management hasn’t been applied elsewhere, and though there's a forlorn prettiness to the likes of Island’s stuttering piano motif and Tokyo Tipping Point’s half-sleep wooziness, too much of the record is let down by an over-reliance on a handful of well-worn pre-sets and production that's indistinguishable from the next bedroom producer with Ableton and a torrent's worth of plug-ins. It could be argued that minimalism is Gestalt’s angle; but by constructing an album with such predominantly leaden elements, this soon becomes a tedious exercise in thematic repetition. [Simon Jay Catling]

http://neugestalt.com