Search - Snd :: Tender Love

It's the Economy, Stupid!!

Phil Avetxori | 07/01/2002

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Minimalist masters of pristine sound design SND return with their third and best album, "Tender Love". Although this is a Mille-Plateaux release, there's a welcome lack of awkward theory in the liner notes; just a smart constructivist-esqe digipak design that suits the cool audio sculptures within. Yes, this is abstract, bare-bones stuff, all pointillist pivots and Ikea whimsy, but that's always been SND's charm. Their first album, "Makesnd Cassette", was an early (and extreme) example of clickwhathaveyou beats with subtle digital smudges like the distant reflection of a Cy Twombly painting on the shiny surface of one of John McCracken's reflectve Minimalist sculptures. "Stdio Snd Types" added pristine melodic planes without changing much rhythm-wise, resulting in a clinical, pixelated, blocky sort of Deep House, without the genre's sexy swoop n'swing. For their latest effort, the soothing melodies of the dissapoiting 2nd album have been retained, but coupled with the first album's emphasis on subtly-edged microrhythms. As has already been pointed out by just about every other review I've read of this cd, the beats are clearly influenced by 2-Step garage and post-Timbaland R&B, but with everything but the bouncing rhythms and flickering melodies erased. Indeed, "erased" is an apt description of what's missing here, with SND's trademark almost-imperceptible digitally smudged edges shimmering around the beats like tiny traces of erased pencil markings on a piece of paper. If you're looking for the aural equivalent of an ornately furnished drawing room, you'll be dissapointed by the Modernist angles of "Tender Love's" architecture, but if you want to bounce around the labrynthine hallways of an abandoned glass and steel office building, gleefully smearing fingerprints on the floor-to-ceiling windows and gobbing all over faded corporate perfection, then dig yr trainers into SND's grey wall-to-wall carpeting and get jiggy with it."

Make out music for the pocket protector crowd

painter@un.org | NYC | 03/21/2002

(3 out of 5 stars)

"I purchased an snd record once before on the buzz and threw it away. Like a lot of the DSP stuff on Ritornell or 12k, I found it almost as exciting as watching paint dry. Granted the mikro-sound has a pedigree, as it is resuscitates the work of Cage and early computer composers and Kraftwerk dabbled in it as well, but in it's unadulterated form, barely discernable sound can be incredibly dull. With "tender love", snd moves in an innovative direction by trying to meld the mikro-sound to simple but moody, nostalgic and somewhat romantic melodies. Comparisons to RnB or breakbeat or any known form of house music are wild and I mean wild flights of imagination, for the most part this stuff is about as funky as chariots of fire. It's a kind of very basic chamber music - quiet relaxed, vaguely romantic - futuristic elevator music...While most of the cuts are either sketchy or too busy, the twelfth cut on the CD presents snd's most fully realized amalgamation of science and sentimentality, and its great - the perfect make-out music for the pocket protector crowd. This cut, or a slightly edited version, is used to great effect as a loop in the Mille Plateaux website. I wish they had dropped the other cuts and just done an hour of number 12. OK, I came back and edited my review a bit after listening to the CD over the weekend. For some reason I want to like this CD. I was impressed by the beautiful clean production and the computer generated sounds are really unique. About half the cuts, those related to the nostalgic tender love theme alluded to above, are really great - the other half sounds like CD skips or patterns of random interference which unfortunatly detracts very seriously from the "tender love" mood. "Tender Love" suffers from coitus interruptus - due to those annoying interludes. If you programme your cd player you can get about half an hour of very interesting and intriging computer music. If they had stretched those cuts out to a full length CD- it would have been great...with a little editing it's worth it."