Here’s something the world could always use more of: a lush ambient techno long-player, blushing with chords and rich with nuance, seamlessly sound-designed to reveal a boundless wealth of detail unfurling along the x-axis. Mammo’s Lateral spreads its feathers across six sides of vinyl, creating a setting where it’s always that purplish time just before dusk—when the shadows are long and a spell seems to settle over the world. The timing is ripe for a record like this: Released on the cusp of daylight saving time, this is the perfect album for the onset of spring, when the lengthening days leave more time to soak up the music’s radiance.
Lateral draws from a rich well of influences, most of them concentrated in the 1990s and very early 2000s: the scuff and interference of classic IDM, the swooning deep house of Larry Heard and Glenn Underground, and, most auspiciously, the dub techno of Basic Channel and its Chain Reaction imprint. In a rare interview, the pseudonymous Italian producer said that he discovered Basic Channel relatively late, and while you can see the influence, you can see points of divergence as well. Vintage dub techno was grimy, barnacle-encrusted, and often user-unfriendly. “Knuckles” may evoke the entropic clanks of Torsten Pröfrock’s Various Artists project, and “Vikare” is a near dead ringer for the underloved Chain Reaction artist Vainqueur, but the music’s beatific tone has more in common with ambient-leaning revivalists like Huerco S. and Purelink than the original generation of experimenters.
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There’s a novocaine quality to this music that makes its marathon runtime go down a lot easier than you might anticipate. The chords on “4.1” and “Semni” could be ambient tracks on their own; snip away some of the rougher edges from the drums and you could easily bring this album to your next massage. Mammo is capable of making challenging music—his previous release, Ulmeyda (as 2501), is full of tangled constructions that creak like Alexander Calder mobiles in need of oiling, while Landmarks, released as Fabiano, is an ambient immersion into inky darkness. Lateral plays it nice, and though a patience tester in the vein of Cyrus’ “Enforcement” might’ve helped it feel a little more immersive, it’s never anything less than a treat for the ears.
The problem is that it’s never really anything more. It lacks a driving obsession. “They Built a Floor of Glass” sounds a little like DJ Sprinkles’ “Grand Central Pt. II (72 Hours by Rail to Missouri),” but while that track played a specific, climactic role within Terre Thaemlitz’s deep-house masterpiece Midtown 120 Blues, “They Built a Floor of Glass” seems to exist primarily for structural reasons, as a late-album ambient void. Luomo’s endless tease, Moodymann’s lush journeys into the heartbeat of soul, Matthew Herbert’s jazzy conviviality, Ricardo Villalobos’s fuck-it-all shroominess—all make you want to follow the artist down the hole in search of whatever rabbit they’re chasing. Lateral gives little indication that its goals are any more exalted than just being a really good ambient techno album.
