portable: my sentient shadow

Following hot on the heels of lead single and recent mind-body tantalizer "I Feel Stronger Now", Circus Company present Portable's latest full-length My Sentient Shadow. Filled to the brim with all of the inventiveness the sonic auteur has commanded you can expect from his sizable and consistent body of work on world-renown labels such as Perlon, ~scape, !K7, his own Süd Electronic and Khoikhoi imprints, and Circus Company, offering perhaps the most cohesive, emotive, and balanced of his highly-admirable catalog here to date. By using the analogy of a shadow that possesses its own consciousness, the theme of light and its distortion vs. balance with the inherent and necessary darkness that surrounds it is in clear vision. Immediately from the warmly bizarre vibes of opening cut "The Simulacrum", it's clear Portable is requesting clearance to other worlds of funk and ingenuity. The delightfully trippy, smoky, back-room of the Tattooine Cantina feel sets the stage just right to curb expectations and let the carefully constructed noise movements wash over you. Elsewhere amongst the generous set you'll find tracks like "Cages" and "Ripple Effect" continue in the direction of horizontally-maximized aural tapestries oozing with texture, while at the other end of the energy spectrum pieces such as "The Self-Assembling" and "We Exist" roll and bounce with all the sci-fi gyrations and slick synth layers hinting at a hypnotic halfway rendezvous point to his Bodycode moniker. And of course, no proper Portable outing would be complete without his own robust tenor vocal tone, which feels right at home front-and-center on the space travel anthem "The Spacetime Curvature" and used in more calculated micro-doses on "Analogue World", as well as the gorgeous "Foreign to You" whose meta-title features a rare guest starring vocalist NiQ.E, and brings to hearts some of Herbert's finer moments with dear friend Dani Siciliano, albeit done-up entirely in some distant yet alluring parallel dimension. The LP journey finishes with the frenetically-charged closer "Fractal Distortion" which will no doubt please many-a cosmic techno purist while making percussion masters from the afterlife such as Jaki Liebezeit and Tony Allen proud, and is quite possibly the closest thing to a danceable musical take on the current state of cognitive dissonance in the world that surrounds everything, offering you a one-way ticket out from the not-too-distant future. "We Exist" features Mandy Alexander. Includes download code.