John Beltran is Detroit techno’s foremost daydreamer. His first albums under his own name, 1995’s Earth & Nightfall and 1996’s cult classic Ten Days of Blue, were blissful-sounding ambient techno records that took the melodic sensibilities of the local scene to their cosmic extremes. Every beep and blip was in harmony with a lush string line, the rhythms less like breakbeats or programmed drums than trance-inducing hammered dulcimers. By 1997’s The Cry, the first album released under his Placid Angles moniker, Beltran had drifted even further into new-age sounds, the beats dislodging themselves and seemingly hanging in mid-air.
As the next generation of electronic musicians, including Four Tet and Skee Mask, absorbed those early albums, Beltran pretty much left techno behind. He explored jazz, post-rock, and straight-up ambient, under his own name and others, before circling back to his roots and finally reviving the Placid Angles project (after encouragement from the young UK producer Lone) on 2019’s First Blue Sky and 2021’s Touch the Earth. While those albums captured much of the project’s early spirit and altered little, Canada, the fourth Placid Angles album, feels different. Changing shape with every track—moving between lush techno, yearning ambient, and toe-scuffing deep house—it’s freeform and dynamic, the work of a musician whose imagination has developed and dilated over the past three decades.
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There are catalysts for this new energy in the younger musicians Beltran brought in to contribute to the album. The back half of Canada opens with “Tides Alternate,” featuring the Leeds techno and house producer Tom VR, on which the breakbeat is so assertive that the bass and swirling synths need to slow to a somnambulant pace to keep the track in balance. On “Wildfire” Beltran brings in the Bristol-based artist Yushh and finds a little tension between muffled samples and a borderline club-ready beat, though the narcotic strings and loops eventually win out. It’s telling that Beltran didn’t seek out young artists on the ambient margins of the scene; the alchemy here comes from the interplay of his hypnotized melodies and the UK producers’ more insistent rhythmic instincts.
Most impressive is “I Want What I Want,” a six-minute song featuring the Vancouver vocalist Sophia Stel, who is the perfect foil for Beltran’s production. Her voice is intimate and resonant, whether cut up into indistinct background flurries or pushed to the front of the mix. When the breakbeat kicks in, restless amid the end-of-the-night melancholy, Stel remains the center of gravity. And though that’s the only lead vocal on the album, Canada is full of voices, which wash in and out with the swell of keys on “Canada” and “Reminds Me of the Rain,” and flutter about on more jittery tracks like “Sun” and “Hero.” Even when melted down or deployed only in fragments, they’re welcome reminders of the presence of humans in Beltran’s daydreams.
