| Artist: Surface 10 Album: Surface Tensions Released: 4 July 2006 | 
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Surface 10 is an amplification of the personality of Dean De Benedictis and Surface Tensions (65'58") is the bracing antidote for the prefabricated electronica of his era. The album presents 11 detailed works seemingly whipped out of reality's raw ingredients. His music exists in an eternal present, always fresh, and not locked into the era of its creation. Liberated enough to be proudly accessible, the up-beat, high-energy tracks possess a lyric quality and communicative ability. De Benedictis plays melodic lines, not just isolated notes, from the orientation of an outsider - a welcome element in an often-antiseptic field. His slick drum arrangements, urgent pacing and calming leads put forth a level of craft yet yields music not glossy enough to sound manufactured. Alongside this unremitting rhythmic intricacy are pieces just as restless and in flux, but minus the heavy pulse-quickening grooves. As oddity follows aberration, Surface Tensions provides various surreal ambient realms every bit as detailed as the more approachable tracks, but with an emphasis on timbre and the combining of a limitless palette of sounds, textures, distortion and glitches. Music and the brain have co-evolved. The music of Surface 10 occupies an intriguing point along this continuum.
- Chuck van Zyl/STAR'S END 3 August 2006 | |
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