Pinch
Reality Tunnels
(Tectonic Recordings)
★★★★

UNDERWATER Dancehall, the debut album by Bristol producer Rob Ellis — Pinch — was a milestone for dubstep in 2007 and Reality Tunnels is his second, recorded at his Logic-based Bristol studio.

The album’s concept is inspired by US writer Robert Anton Wilson’s 1983 book Prometheus Rising, relating to how individuals create their own perspective and the subjective filters they apply to their world.

That world view, encapsulated in a prophetic sleeve design, is driving Ellis into new realms of electro-orchestral textures.

Slow trip-hop vocal layers from guest vocalist Emika give way to shuddering techno tribal influences on opener Entangled Particles, before the album switches to the off-centre focus of All Man Got with pleading rap treatments from Trim.

Beginning a triptych of future quantum techno, Accelerated Culture and Returnity offer utopian cinematic rave soundscapes, while Making Space drives with ecstatic hypnotic circular rhythms, conjuring new atmospheres.

Metrik
Ex Machina
(Hospital Records)
★★★★

TOM MUNDELL, aka Metrik, is a London-based drum and bass stalwart of some 10 years. His work continues to scale new heights and has packed out dance floor tours across the US, Europe and Australasia.

His third album on Hospital Records, an exhilarating and well-executed evolution of his unique sonic talents, is filled with high-octane drum frequencies and first-class dance-floor bass lines.

His phased robotic vocals and songwriting take centre stage on Ex Machina, which features label mates Grafix and ShockOne.

Opener Automata has bruising triangular and meaty sub-bass lines, crunchy riffs and melodic highs, while Grafix contributes to the electronic dance-rock hybrid Parallel, where the pair demonstrate their production mastery through euphoric melodies and anthemic synth hooks.

Punch tracks Hackers and We Are The Energy further progress Metrik's ever-developing drum and bass output.

Vikingur Olafsson
Debussy and Rameau
(Deutsche Grammophon)
★★★★

RENOWNED Icelandic pianist Vikingur Olafsson’s fourth album for Deutsche Grammophon follows his highly rated releases Philip Glass Piano Works and Johann Sebastian Bach.

Philippe Rameau and Claude Debussy were two contrasting French composers and Olafsson explores their extraordinary innovations in harmony and form.

They aimed at a new impressionist, painterly music, seeking to engages more of the senses than just that of hearing, and both enjoyed giving their compositions titles that stimulated the imagination, the music itself ranging from the purely pragmatic to the entirely abstract.

The album opens with Debussy’s rarely performed La Damoiselle Elue, an elegiac work aimed at a space between life and death, a conversation between those who cannot converse.

It is an appropriate starting point for this exchange between composers, setting the scene for what is to come. A remarkably refreshing, glacial approach to a new piano sensibility.