- Gently experimental electronics from a long-time Four Tet associate, embellished with Armenian instrumentation and intimate field recordings.
- Hagop Tchaparian has long been a background figure in the British electronic scene, serving as Four Tet's tour manager since the early '00s. All the while, he's used the precious time away to capture audio he felt compelled to preserve over the last 15 years, be it large events or a single street performer. Now, Four Tet returns the favour by releasing Tchaparian's debut album Bolts on his own Text Records label. Stepping out from behind odd unreleased remix to an out-and-out full-length, Tchaparian has sought to compile his archive of lived-in field recordings and entangle it with the music he's been a part of for decades. Bolts is as ambiguous as it is head-turningly mercurial.
Tchaparian is unbound to any particular genre. He tries his hand at techno, microhouse ambient and more, without ever having one style that he can call home—yet his palette of caustic synths, rattling qanun and squawking zurna horns bridges the songs together, leaving a distinct imprint on each new interpretation. "Right To Riot" is the most explosive and inventive track here, congregating a fleet of unruly drums around a fiery zurna. The way he loops the sample forms a siren that spirals with the intensity of a strobe light, while a jolting bass drone completes the monster.
Other tracks display strong sentiment rather than soaring energy. "Raining" trudges with a stomp-clap trip-hop rhythm and shadowy drones that create a feeling of languid motion, like the grit of constant travel or the tiredness of being away from home. "Round" could have snuck onto Four Tet's New Energy undetected. It's littered with popping textures, scratchy sounds and a decaying synth that sweeps up feelings of loss and reconnection simultaneously.
The field recordings on Bolts reveal incidental beauty in moments of close personal importance to Tchaparian. He uses the hard cuts of audio samples to rhythmic effect, like on the tense thrum of the opener "Timelapse," or the makeshift beat constructed out of a communal fireworks display on "Ldz." Sometimes the sounds Tchaparian recalls are hazy and half-formed: the plucked qanun on "Jordan" shifts in and out like a foggy memory. To Tchaparian, these recordings come with memory attached. To outside listeners, we're left with just the abstract ideas, though the multi-fidelity meshes he builds extend these snapshots in time, like an aural Live Photo.
The detours that the album (and sometimes the songs) take means that Bolts is most at home somewhere between the bedroom and the dance floor. "Flame" uses this liminal space to its advantage, toggling between rocky triplet drums, a ch-ch-Chicago house snare and a forest of free-flowing bass tones. The two begin to come together magnetically, but once the track reaches its peak, the bass dashes away and leaves behind only a limpid beat.
"GL," like "Right To Riot," uses the zurna as a vehicle for catharsis as it writhes in anguish on a bed of fazed synths. Building up towards a uniform techno climax, you barely get a chance to digest the mania before it's interrupted by a short dubstep coda. It's this track that conveys one of the album's concepts most effectively—rarely are such heights captured once again, much like the precious moment in time that Tchaparian uses as emotional markers throughout Bolts.
Tracklist01. Timelapse
02. GL
03. Escape
04. Flame
05. Raining
06. Right To Riot
07. Round
08. Jordan
09. Ldz
10. Iceberg