[reviews] afe50007
jacob ludvigsen: metal chinchilla

Metal Chinchilla is something as unusual as a debut-ep from a Danish electronic musician, who stands outside the sometimes too fixed “old school electronica-frame”, which Autechre and Black Dog laid down years ago.

Jacob Ludvigsen, who previously has produced tracks for the Danish Datanom-site (www.datanom.com), is musically some place very different.

His debut release is also special, because it is a part of a series of extremely limited 3” CD releases on the small Italian label Afe Records who releases these 3” CDs to promote new and innovative music.

Ludvigsen’s music is very well placed within the musical minefield of weird ideas and infinite originality, which Datanom represent.

The EP consists of 12 tracks, which melt together into a single sequence, that constantly slides backwards and forwards between extremely abstract soundscapes and acrobaticly rhytmic beats.

The raw material for the music is also a bit untypical, because it is a series of field recordings, which have been heavily manipulated using the so-called DSP algorithms. This gives the music a singing metallic/glasslike sound, which brings the work of fellow Dane Per Høier to mind.

It is the the colour of the sound and the relatively loose and improvised impression, which make the release a breath of freash air in the electronica-scene, that too often use the same ideas and patterns.

Added to that is Jacob Ludvigsen rather difficult to put a label on musically. The music is for example quite experimental, but after all not as radical and noisy as the material released by his closest musical relatives from the Datanom-society.

Metal Chinchilla is an EP which, even though it is original and boundary-breaking, could appeal to the listeners - who normally wouldn’t listen to the most radical fields of electronic music - with it’s after all rather friendly and obliging soundscape.

[Morten Bruun]