Jakob Skøtt - All The Colours Of The Dust (2016)

The album opens with its most shamelessly indulgent piece, the 13-minute ‘Age OF Isotopes’. It’s a funky stomper, propelled forward by its powerful, perfectly recorded drumbeats and meaty bass-replicating synth chords while other wilder and lighter keyboard sounds float around the speakers. The tempo gets faster and faster as the track builds, threatening to spin completely out of control at certain points, before becoming moderately mellower towards the finale and ending with some nice relaxing Cluster-y ambience.

Its four sibling tracks clock in at around seven minutes each and, though they’re cooked from the same essential ingredients, each has its own individual flavour. The beats on ‘Face Peradam’ are especially intense but are counterbalanced by the cosmic nature of the atmospherics. The vibes of ‘The Variable’, meanwhile, have a vaguely Middle Eastern aroma and ‘Iron Nebula’ is defined by its swaggering organ drones. The shape-shifting polyrhythms of ‘All The Colours’ draw the album to a close, ending proceedings with a triumphant long-held synth chord as if to say, “yep, nailed it”.

Along with Skøtt’s astounding, octopus-like drum talents, what’s really impressive about his “verses synthesizers” work is the way it often sounds like he’s used guitars or horns at various points, even though all the music, bar the beats, is created from electric keys alone. The results outstrip many of the multi-membered full live bands that specialise in this style of electro-psych friskiness and certainly surpass the quality of what happens when most guys play with themselves, as it were.