Ricardo Donoso is Brazilian-born and Boston-based, one half of the reel-to-reel mind distortion project Perispirit, and the guy behind the outsider record label Semata Productions. On top of that he's also a member of the fantastically gnarly metal band Ehnare. So it comes with a certain deep left-of-center pedigree that Donoso's latest output explores the boundaries between ambient and Brazilian “morning dance music” (which he experienced at raves growing up”, as well as a sort of Kosmiche existentialism in which synth sequences spiral ad infinitum into deeper realms of intricate repetition. The beauty of this latest experiment, though, is that Donoso has yanked all drum sequencing from the mix, meaning that we're listening to the ghost of a dance floor – the harmonic cloth of the composition free-floats without its steel structure: none of the snare snaps or lo-end foundations that dance music takes for granted are there to stop us from falling completely into the void.
Progress Chance is out August 25 on Digitalis Recordings.
