Everybody understands the ominous descriptor “pleasant tasting” on the side of a bottle of cough syrup. Worlds away from delicious or even merely tasty, “pleasant tasting” was always my childhood harbinger of squashed insects, never adequately masked by all that sickly sweetness. On first listen at least, Digitaline draws a parallel squiggle (and boom-click) with sound: Anticlockwise is the very definition of pleasant-sounding.

Yes, it’s the dreaded minimal, returned-repressed as high-tech background music. Strangely though, that’s also the strength of this release—while none of the tracks reward the close scrutiny of headphone walkabouts (and indeed, through some strange trompe l’oeil, it’s almost impossible to focus on these tracks) they bubble away beautifully in the background, almost minding their own business. This is the minimal your domesticated machines make in and for themselves.

It feels pointless to describe these tracks for their landmarks, but the landscapes they all commonly describe are filled with slow-fading loop ideas, melodo-textural themes that roll in, wiggle around, and then (after a few minutes) are either joined by a new plateau, driven onto other pleasures, or faded out again. Interestingly, the duo’s live set (available here) works in exactly the same way, totally confounding any expectation you might have that music should “go somewhere.” It’s unashamedly pointless, pleasant music, no question—but like online chat, there’s a great undirected, non-purposive quality in it.

Cadenza / Cadenza 14
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[Peter Chambers]