Sven Schienhammer certainly has done a great deal of work in getting the sound right for this album. From the first track, you immediately hear the influence of “Basic Channel” bleeding through the sweet sounds. Upon further, deeper listening to the album I began to get a little disappointed. Though my first impression of this is positive, I can’t help but to feel this lends itself better to ‘background music’ rather than anything you’d deeply engage.
Unusual Signals starts out strong, very strong with “Amanita Muscaria”. Slinging around, exploring new territory and doing some interesting panning, I want the rest of the album to be this strong. Most of it unfortunately fails in comparison. The other songs lack a certain hypnotic quality. Compared to other minimal dub acts, he fails to have a certain hook. Having something to bring the listener in, the way good minimal dub techno can. Again, I use Basic Channel. Though they use repetition a lot, there is a certain purpose to it. Here it just feels empty, feels false.
Each song builds the same way. It dissipates in the same fashion. Yes, I know this is minimal, but had Sven employed a few different approaches, it might have paid off in a more interesting album. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have enough interesting things going on to explain 10 minute track lengths where little happens. I wanted to like this more than I did.