Bleep

Brian Leeds has come to be defined by his left turns. His many fragmented aliases and the paradigm shifts of his main gig as Huerco S. make sense when considering his musical upbringings of new age, grindcore, and house. Still, it seems like For Those Of You Who Have Never (And Also Those Who Have) took the music world by surprise, stripping back the drums in favour of a fully ambient journey beyond the ultraworld for Proibito. It proved a fateful moment: a year later Leeds’ West Mineral Ltd. label would become a necessary fixture of fresh, future facing ambience, while only a handful of months after its release in 2016 did Pitchfork name it one of the best ambient albums of all time, and little has budged it from that position in the decade since.

Refraining from the fuzzy, subdued kick drum rhythms around which Leeds built most of his work prior, including his 2013 debut Colonial Patterns on OPN’s Software, For Those Of You... may seem like a drastic change for the Kansas-born and New-York-based producer. But the richly textured patterns on this album evoke a mystical atmosphere not dissimilar to the feel of its predecessors, made in a semi lucid, hypnagogic state. Much like the early days of Huerco S. with his 2012 Opal Tapes slow-burner, his second long player dives deep into the hazy early morning hours and digital fuzz of the post-rave generations' spliff in hand penchant towards inner escapism, that also acts in many ways as a perfectly exulted introduction to ambient for those of you who haven't yet taken the trip (and also those who have).

Melodies lurk beneath the surface, muted and meandering through the shifting sediment of a delta’s many streams. Sometimes they emerge as a bigger picture over multiple loops of these volatile compositions, exemplified in the micro movements of Fender Rhodes keys on ‘Hear Me Out’, the dubby, dusty arpeggios of ‘Cubist Camouflage’, and the deep, lullaby-esque ‘Promise Of Fertility’. When the seemingly arrhythmic structures of ‘Marked For Life’ take on new forms through delay effects, Leeds’ mastery of metamorphosis is in full bloom: a truly enticing departure from the more traditional beat-based compositions.