- Seven years after his last release, Jamie Teasdale's castles in the sky are only getting more epic.
- Since hanging up his dubstep boots as Jamie Vex'd and introducing the world to Kuedo with the Blade Runner trap of Severant, Jamie Teasdale has been, as he told Lauren Martin, working with the idea of soundtrack "as a musical idiom." This is both literal and figurative. He's made a living in the world of soundtracks, producing everything from Nike adverts to arthouse films. But soundtracks more abstractly have also been his musical lexicon for both the synth pop romanticism of Severant and its slightly more decayed and ominous follow-up, the Manhunter-indebted Slow Knife. Infinite Window, his third album (and first in seven years), is his boldest. Synth arpeggios and sci-fi melodies sweep across the stereo spectrum with a breathless sense of drama, as he moves further and further away from anything like regular rhythms.
Infinite Window clocks in at 39 minutes, making it the shortest Kuedo album, and also the most upbeat. Both previous LPs had an overarching sense of melancholy where, on Infinite Window, Teasdale sounds enamored with the magic of his machines. Nearly a third of the record is made up of older Kuedo tracks that Teasdale has updated, and it's easy to see how parts of Infinite Window both depart and expand from his other work.
The first half is nearly clubby: "Shadow Dance" and "Harlequin Hallway" in particular pack the wallop of some of the early Kuedo 12-inches. "Harlequin Hallway" even features an extended break with snare rolls building into a whirlpool so dense they suck the light out of the melody—think Jana Rush remixing Tangerine Dream. "Time Glides" is just as fierce, like Lex Luger's drums and Hudson Mohawke's synths were soundtracking the ballroom scene in Beauty & The Beast. Even the panning arpeggios that open "Sliding Through Our Fingers" are offset by delayed claps and bass rumble.
Teasdale goes full Vangelis on part two. I know I'm not alone in imagining some sort of bad guy overtaking our hero when the kick drums gain ground in the spine-tingling "Skybleed Magic," only to have them taken down in the song's beatless reprieve. The sequencing drives this sense of narrative as Teasdale swaps song structure for texture in the album's most memorable suite. It's nearly impossible to tell where "Infinite Window," "Paradise Water" and "Skybleed Magic," begin or end.
In the same interview with Martin, Teasdale described an anxiety of influence as critics have tried to sift through the references in his work. This felt reductive, "a kind of Easter egg hunt." "I think of genre references as more like mimetic inheritance," he continued, "one piece births another, which creates lineages." Infinite Window is very much a "mimetic inheritance," the most complex and complete distillation of the Kuedo lineage yet. We hear everyone from Vangelis and Zimmer to HudMo and Flying Lotus to Mala and Skream. But we also really hear Kuedo. No producer that emerged from the dubstep world has created a sound as singular as he has and, three albums in, Infinite Window comes as close to perfect an example of his sound as we've heard yet.
Tracklist01. Sliding Through Our Fingers
02. Harlequin Hallway
03. Time Glides
04. Aeolian Bodies
05. Shadow Dance
06. Encounter(vanish)
07. Infinite Window
08. Paradise Water
09. Skybleed Magic
10. Cracked Face Panel
11. Never - Para Siempre