Following his astounding 2015 full-length debut The Blue Quicksand Is Going Now, uncategorizable New Zealand-born producer Fis (Oliver Peryman) made a natural leap to Subtext, home to releases by genre-defying artists such as Emptyset and Roly Porter. While Blue Quicksand found the producer continuing to push away from his drum'n'bass roots into an undefined bleak netherworld, From Patterns to Details goes even further into Surround Sound doom. It's darker, heavier, and more apocalyptic than anything he's done before. There are moments of frayed, shimmering melodies that seem pretty at first, but then he rips them apart so they explode and scatter. Drums make sporadic appearances, and there's even a shuddering rhythm to the harrowing rave hallucination "Independently Together," but the beats generally seem to shoot out among the screeching, slashing, and sloshing. Best of all is "CMB Inna," which washes time-stretched vocals and cinematic horns in layers of distortion and bludgeoning bursts of noise, blasting straight toward a distant galaxy. Harsh and volatile, the album is thrilling and unpredictable from start to finish. Along with Roly Porter's Third Law and Paul Jebanasam's Continuum, From Patterns to Details proved that 2016 was an exceptional year for intense, unrelenting sound design.
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