Dillon’s first solo album, Workaround, was a highlight of 2020, and was rightly hailed in all the right places as marking the arrival of a sparkling new talent. She doesn’t seem to have been super prolific since then, and I confess that some of the stuff she has released didn’t quite do it for me.
This, though, is proper good. The most obvious difference to her debut is that, while Workaround had fourteen tracks of about three minutes each, Basho is one twenty-minute piece. This gives it a very different vibe: the shattered abstract techno beats and burbling synth melodies are still present and correct, but instead of a sequence of delightful miniatures we have something which has room to breathe and to grow. A fraction of the lightness of touch is gone, and instead we have a subtly deepening intensity that can even be slightly hypnotic if you’re in the right mood. Oh, and in the last two minutes there’s a sound that comes in that inevitably makes me think about mid-period Autechre (in a good way). Top notch work.
I bought this from the artist’s bandcamp page.
dogrando writes about some records 