ricardo donoso: assimilating the shadow

In the time since Ricardo Donoso delivered his debut album Progress Chance, he's been pursuing his take on morning music even further. Informed by deep house, slowed-down trance and club influences, this new album unfolds to reveal elaborate sonic labyrinths that emerge out of the burning embers of dance music. Assimilating the Shadow has been designed to be consumed at sunrise, at the party's end. It assembles dark, carefully-considered sequences layered in a way that seems on first listen to be a fusion of opposites. Sacred geometry sets the stage for these intricate, emotional structures, illustrating tonal passages that appear divergent on first listen but which become coherent the further into the album you delve. It's an album that harks back to the beginnings of dance music but which somehow sidesteps the usual revivalist signatures that have become all too familiar in recent years, instead opting for a rhythmically complex variant that echoes early Jean Michel Jarre, Cluster, Manuel Göttsching and Speedy J but with a strange compositional quality quite unlike any of its influences.

Ricardo Donoso "From Sterling to Snow"