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Dusted Reviews
Artist: John Roberts Album: Paper Frames Label: Dial Review date: Nov. 14, 2012 |
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John Roberts scored a nice little coup with his debut album Glass Eights, on Hamburg’s Dial Records, a label known for these things. The Ohio-born, Berlin-based producer has developed even more control over his sound on the Paper Frames EP, which comes at the end of a two-year silence. His debut album’s deep house had a pronounced chamber-music undercurrent on tracks like "Pruned," and that autumnal vibe comes even more to the fore on Paper Frames.
Roberts is a masterful sampler, and Paper Frames is elegantly constructed out of roughly quarried vinyl, from the chunky drum kits at the base to the finer masonry of the melodic passages above. On paper, it sounds like a grotesque collaboration between Moodymann and Hauschka, but Roberts’s splices feel natural. He’s both more starry-eyed and more rhythmically potent on "Paper Frames" and "Crushing Shells," the two dance cuts here. The EP is rounded out by a couple of decorative, beatless and nameless interludes, in spite of which the EP feels brief.
That’s also partly due to the EP’s stop-and-start dynamics. "Paper Frames" is a desultory whirlpool of chimes, piano, and other tinkling noises until a highly motivated beat snaps the track out of its daze to a pistoning 130 BPM. "Crushing Shells" is dreamier still, but also enjoys an unusual amount of downtime for dance music. Impressionist daubs of melody — in the vein of Susumu Yokota but lacking his gooey sentiment — circulate around a warm, softly bowed cello bassline and sounds that would be precious if they weren’t counterbalanced by a surefooted beat. And then it’s rather abruptly over.
Roberts hasn’t reinvented his sound at all with Paper Frames, and that’s a good thing considering how well Glass Eights holds up. Even as he masters his materials, the newly convulsive and punchy John Roberts is still deftly avoiding both the obvious and subtle pitfalls of reconciling two sounds usually kept well apart.
By Brandon Bussolini
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Glass Eights