- A new ASC record can mean a lot of things. It can mean forward-thinking 170 BPM music. It can mean drifting, enveloping ambient. It can mean straight-up techno. Or it can mean some combination of all three, which is what we get on The Farthest Reaches. Dating back to 2014, the EP's four tracks come from a pivotal period in James Clements' career, when he was discovering how to combine his love for techno with his mastery of 170 BPM. Laying the foundations for his genre-melting Grey Area project, each of these tracks stretches beyond ten minutes and changes tempo at some point along the way. Even putting the impressive tempo trickery aside, The Farthest Reaches is up there with Clements' best work.
When Clements does ambient, he can tell a story with just a few glacial chords. These tracks have an engrossing filmic quality—on "Exoplanet" the protagonist steps onto a foggy moor. That one has all the majesty of some lost Deepchord classic, starting out like roaming dub techno before it takes on a more familiar rhythmic shape for the second half. The rest of The Farthest Reaches plays with the same idea in different configurations. "Ceres" features two different drum tracks, both intricate and hybridized. "Suncycle" exemplifies how Clements writes drum & bass from a techno perspective, showing that—despite the tempos—there doesn't have to be a fundamental difference in approach.
The best track on The Farthest Reaches points towards Grey Area. "Arc" is a long piece of pillowy sound design, like one of Clements' Silent Season 12-inches left to disintegrate into the atmosphere. It's neither ambient, nor techno, nor drum & bass, but something in between, which has come to define much of Clements' recent work. And though these tracks represent an embryonic idea that has since blossomed into a fully-formed concept, they capture an artist at his experimental and creative peak.
TracklistA Arc
B Exoplanet
C Suncycle
D Ceres