Fog by Audiokern
An array of electronic delights
This one's a bit of an oddball release (vinyl-only for starters, where's the digital?). The man responsible is Swiss producer Alain Zumbühl, who has been quietly releasing his music as Audiokern since 2014. On Fog, his fourth EP, he's joined by Samuel Rohrer, who adds percussive flair (as well as a complete rework of opening track Black Birds) and Andrew Nimmo, who injects a Jazzy radiance with his saxophone, and with them presents his most thought-provoking work to date.
As a sequence the six tracks sound quite disparate, so while they could be lifted out of the EP context and still prove wholly engaging, the listening experience can be a bit of a head-twister, gambolling from jazzy vibes to hypnotic Techno and Dub to Hip-Hop-inflected rhythms and ending with a conspicuous Burial-inspired pastiche. A connecting concept could be found for the more inquisitive listener but the samples and track titles are just too vague to offer anything obviously meaningful. And as nice as closing track A Dream Last Night is, it feels like it's been tacked on at the end as an afterthought.