Gamelan has long been a fascination for the headier end of the electronic world, whether it’s Plaid asking a 26-person Balinese ensemble to open for them at Le Poisson Rouge, Aphex Twin emulating the genre in his more acoustic experiments, or Björk using it as a template to create her own customized instruments. The two forms make a surprisingly logical pair: Both dance music and the ancient Indonesian style are based around repetition, exploring the gradually evolving frictions in rhythm and melody that can suck the listener into a state of hypnosis. It’s not that it’s a brand new concept for the Russian producer Hoavi to incorporate gamelan into his music, as he does on his latest album; rather, it’s the way he subsumes the style into his very logic that feels so intoxicating.
Kirill Vasin’s releases as Hoavi have tended toward the aqueous. His releases across labels such as Quiet Time, Peak Oil, and Balmat—where he’s leaned toward both the ambient and clubby side of the scale—have ebbed with grainy textures and mulching grooves. Architectonics takes this murky style and plunges it to a new deep, incorporating the bronze gong and chime sounds of gamelan while burying his rhythms in dense, dubby layers of incense smoke. Recording textures wherever he could find them using his phone and contact mics, Vasin’s beats seem to lurk in the shadows, scattering in all directions the second you think you’ve got a grip on them. It’s a big step forward for him as a producer, and a deliciously swampy chill-out session.
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Operating somewhere between the steamy formlessness of Topdown Dialectic and the tactile throb of Shackleton, Vasin uncovers some of his most distinctive rhythms by mutating the space surrounding his samples. “Keris” nervously twitches like a prey being stalked, as Hoavi’s ringing bells constantly knock the track off its center. The calmer “Song of the Forgotten” sinks into its trickling polyrhythms, bathing his bonangs and sarons in a mesmerizing wash of saxophone-laden surface noise. Throughout Architectonics, Hoavi vacillates between the more tranquil sound of Javanese gamelan and its more frantic Balinese variant, as “Triad of Becoming” and “After a Day of Silence” both build from lurching, bassy beginnings into zig-zagging walls of glimmering percussion.
Tracks like these more directly emulate gamelan music. It’s fun, but Architectonics is at its most immersive when Hoavi delves fully into his own universe, letting his tracks move in unpredictable directions: the way he deploys a slight hi-hat-like beat halfway through “Wayang” before quickly snatching it away, or how his drum samples on “Shadows of the Limits” seem to be in a constant process of swallowing themselves whole. Hoavi’s uncovered a dark, miragelike dimension to play in here, and he sounds best when he’s not just paying tribute to this traditional music, but reframing its qualities for himself. When he does, Architectonics is a uniquely entrancing artifact.
