The closing track on 'from memory' is called 'maybe (intro)': 47 seconds of ambient that end the record exactly where anyone else would have started it. That structural joke sums up the debut album from Aydn, a Bristol producer: nine pieces in under 25 minutes, built on extremes that touch, where nothing lasts as long as you expect or moves at the speed of the track before it.
'Retrospect' versus 'Voicemail'
The core tension is tempo. 'did you miss me?' opens in dubstep at 75 BPM, all half-time and air; 'Resolution' immediately fires the same key —Gb minor— up to 132 in drum & bass mode. The most violent pull sits in the middle: 'Retrospect' sets the ceiling at 140 BPM of bassline-leaning garage, and 'Voicemail' answers with the floor, 70 BPM —exactly half— across a minute and a half that dissolves before it settles. The swing is tonal too: almost the whole record lives in minor keys, with Gb minor anchoring both opener and closer, while the only two major-key clearings, '0117' and 'Crux', arrive back to back inside the same 85-87 BPM drum & bass block, as if calm were only allowed on the home stretch. 'Crux' is also the longest cut at 4:15 — five times the length of the closer.
The titles finish the game of opposites: '0117' is Bristol's dialling code, his home city, while 'Voicemail', 'Closure' and 'did you miss me?' sketch a breakup told in fragments, somewhere between a message left and a reply that never comes. Goldfat describes itself on Bandcamp as a DIY collective putting out music "between life's moments", and that spirit suits an album that prefers the fragment to the anthem. With support from Carl Cox, UKF and BBC Radio 1 according to his own page, Aydn doesn't need to stretch anything: on 'from memory' the extremes —fast and slow, major and minor, 47 seconds and four minutes— are the message.
Sources: Bandcamp (Aydn) · Bandcamp (Goldfat)