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Bands should never limit themselves, especially by using strict lines of demarcation to box themselves into a genre, sound or style. After all, just because you feel like creating the hardest and heaviest piece of music one day, you might want to do something delicate and deft the next. While it doesn’t always make sense to release such diverse sounds under the same band banner or project total, you could always do what Tidal Water does and create a second sonic channel to release music that has, perhaps, a different audience.
Although known for some of the most exploratory, genre-hopping, and all-encompassing music of recent times, Tidal Water has teamed up with producer Papa J to explore musical creativity that takes them down a path that doesn’t quite lead to their usual, admittedly already reasonably broad, musical vision. Here, the music is forged and formed around a core of Drum and Bass sounds, but, as with Tidal Water, it is what is added to the sonic mix that makes the music so seductive.
And so, with vocalist Martin Hovden taking a self-deprecating and often humorous look at his own ego, Papa J aka Johannes Radøy building sonic soundscapes for him to surf and Jim Lehner adding live drums to bring some analogue energy to the digital drive, you have a genuinely intriguing track.
The result is a warped and wilfully lazy take on the drum and bass sound, but here, it employs as much space as it does creative juices, spaciously and cleverly framing the strange sonics and salvos of sound, as well as the world-weary lyrics that are as introspective as they are intentionally barbed.
Although initially an avenue to explore and creatively push Tidal Water’s music through a different filter, this project has quickly grown into its own, self-contained sonic beast. And if it has grown beyond that initial remit, it is also pushing at the confines of the drum and bass sound itself and begs vital questions as to what that genre might be, where it is going, and just how you keep such an established genre relevant, moving with the times, fresh, healthy, and rewarding in the modern age.
