KHOTIN Schallplatten & CDs

Review: Khotin - or Canadian electronic musician Dylan Khotin-Foote if you prefer - returns with 'Peace Portal', a six-track suite gliding us through a tantric slow motion, threading gauzy textures through ambient, Balearic, and soft-focus downtempo. After a decade refining his palette across releases for labels like 1080p and Ghostly International, here he reserves some of his most intimate and glowing material for his own platform, Khotin Industries. Opener 'You Made My Weekend Wonderful' sets the tone with choir-like vapour trails and delicate piano, while 'HP 1' follows in a dream state of sub-bass eddies, flowing seamlessly into the playful skip of 'Druid Dance'. The B deepens the haze: 'Vacation (Spam Free Mix)' evokes luxury resort liminality with plush pads and sunkissed low-end, 'Oasis Bioreference' drips warped acid through a slow-motion filter. Each piece is a postcard from somewhere gently unreal.

Review: Albertan experimenter Dylan Khotin follows up last year's full-length with an equally impressionistic two-tracker and logical successor, 'Alterac Acid/Mornings II'. Both tracks here are curious digi-Balearic offerings, with spacious episcopies of sound cast across meandering landscapes once seemingly trawled by space invaders and/or deep-cosmos probes. A nearly aimless acid line unfurls across the A-side, locking things into a nice stasis, before a more subdued, dare say clipped stab-womp drives the action of the B-track, which hardly so much as teases its drum line, nor avails itself of a need to even use drums at all (at points) to compel the listener into a driven, awestruck state of bliss.

Review: Canada may not shout as loud as the US, UK or Germany when it comes to electronic music, with the exception of Richie Hawtin perhaps, albeit frequently assumed he's American, and is actually part-British. Nevertheless, the larger North American state has a truly remarkable legacy in house, techno, ambient, and synth-y odds and sods.

It's proof the apple never falls far from the tree, given proximity to some of the bonafide birthplaces of those sounds - Chicago and Detroit. Edmonton's Khotin is indicative of the difficult to define tones that emanate from the Maple Leaf and its people. So much texture, pouring with emotion, and fundamentally born of new ideas, or at least different ways of thinking. Release Spirit, his third album on Michigan's Ghostly International, is thoughtful, intelligent, downtempo electronic stuff, crafted with love and attention to detail.