As If - 10 Views from a Different Angle

Release date: 4/8/22As If is Kennenth Werner, who has spent the last ten-plus years developing his own unique strand of ambient dub and dub techno, and his debut for Carpe Sonum manages to bridge the worlds of Namlook, echo, and reverb in a stunning, virtuosic display sure to dazzle the cochlea. One might well call Werner something of a minimalist, as he effectively does so much with seemingly so little: a tightly-stretched weave of looped aural gauze here, an infinitely-mapped substrata of atmospherica there, until the listener is essentially swallowed in the luscious galactic beds of sonic velvet Werner augurs. Each of these “views” on hand establishes an interlocking series of pulse and shimmer that opens up breathtaking worlds, from the mutating theremin-esque shudderscape of “View 5”, all preening menace and abject wonder, to the newfangled analog bubblebath of “View 7”, ingeniously reimagining Klaus Schulze in a sensory deprivation tank of arch dub pulsations, Werner’s creat