Comanche “Silicon Basilica”

05 Jul 2013 — Trey Reis

Nostalgia has become a huge buzz-word in music. Musicians are buying specific, old instruments and using dated recording methods to achieve and repurpose classic sounds. A lot of it surrounding modern dance music involves a revisiting of disco and the fuzzy sound of 80s pop. But there is an entire crowd of young beatmakers for which this definition of nostalgia doesn’t apply. By the time they were able to hear music with a basic understanding of genre, they were already messing around with Ableton, Pro Tools, etc. For these musicians, the window of time they are looking back on nostalgically is much smaller than the 30 to 40 years of music history older musicians have been exploring. They have only ever known software music; they don’t have an old 4-track recorder to dig out of their closet. Without as large of a personal musical history to sift through, these young’uns are pushing forward trends in EDM music less than a decade old, in some cases, expanding on ideas so recent, they haven’t yet been categorized as a trend. This has resulted in a pace of new music almost directly matching the alarming rate of progress of all other forms of technology.

At the forefront of this is NY’s Astro Nautico label, who seem to be breaking new ground with every release. They just celebrated their 21st release with Comanche’s Silicon Basilica, which pays as much attention to environment and mood as it does drums and melodies. It’s an album wrapped in its own world, rather than the single-by-single nature of the rest of mp3DM. You may want to get on this one quick, because you know these Astro Nautico kids will be to something completely different by the time their 22nd release rolls around.

Stream Silicon Basilica below or just download it for free from the Astro Nautico website, and donate to their Kickstarter in conquest of raising enough funds to put out music on vinyl, so all of this headlong progress doesn’t get lost in the Web.