- Orang/Asli are the duo Atli Mar Thorvaldsson (Orang Volante) and Jón Frímannsson (Asli) from Iceland, far from the straits where they’ve borrowed their names. Released on the recently excellent Farside label, Orang/Asli’s Glengoyne Spring EP sits in a gentle valley between other deep/tech/house output of labels like Aus, Liebe Detail, Mule Electroniq and Dessous.
All four tracks on the EP are polished works in their own right. Asli’s ‘Makes Me Move’ is driven by a male vocal loop which stretched from here to the blue-skyed horizon; ‘Glengoyne’ (by Orang Volante) harks back to the early 00s and the smooth sailing of Force Tracks’ glassy disco, or even the slinky grooves of early Pokerflat; ‘Springsequence’ spins through a slightly trancey melody redolent of Superpitcher’s out-of-character remix of Lawrence’s ‘Along the Wire’. Each offers an enjoyable mood and direction of its own, but real highlight for me is the Wespark Unit remix of ‘Springsequence’, which heads for the late night nasty by toughening up the low-end and smearing the synth melody right across the dancefloor, where it eventually evaporates into a granular cavern of reverb.
It’s especially true of ‘Glengoyne’, but really, any of these tracks could have been produced at any time in the past seven years (and more likely in the early 00s). I don’t say this as a diss, but note it as emblematic of the constancy of this kind of melodic minimal tech-house, a style I (and obviously a lot of others) are far from tired of, and while there’s nothing script-flippingly amazing here, this is still a very decent EP with four solid, well-done tracks.
TracklistA1 Asli - Makes Me Move
A2 Asli - Springsequence (Westpark Unit Remix)
AA1 Orang Volante - Glengoyne
AA2 Asli - Springsequence