- The Future EP for Public Information saw Ivo Pacheco try his hand at conceptualism. And though its conceit—an ode to rave's lost golden era—felt a little laboured, the music itself was his finest to date, showcasing a scuffed, widescreen sound built on arresting juxtapositions of sweetness and darkness. If that EP was the Portuguese producer's after-hours record, then Light Moving, for Ramp, is pitched directly at peak-time—though it's peak-time as heard through the fog of memory.
The excellent "Light Moving" is tumbledown techno with an absurd edge (the choral samples that periodically rise to its scummy surface convey a garbled pomposity). The closing track deploys similar tools with a straighter face, though judging by its descent from churchlike beauty to muffled rave chaos, Pacheco's idea of a "Pure Morning" involves a soundsystem, a forest clearing and a Fiat Punto full of drugs. Elsewhere we get the soundtrack to said morning. "Strangers" and "Hardcore World '94" are grotty, anarchic bangers, their finer details lost in wheezing surface noise and treacly synths. "Night Forest" is, like Pacheco's best work, both scuzzy and pretty, but its pirouetting melody is, once again, almost suffocated by the layers of interference, a technique which is faintly frustrating, but intoxicating, too.
TracklistA1 Light Moving
A2 Hardcord World '94
B1 Strangers
B2 Night Forest
B3 Pure Morning