Tien

A LIEN RESURRECTION
Dave Ren - better known as fifty percent of acclaimed electronica duo Lien - has snuck stealthily back into the fold and delivered the long-awaited release under his T'ien moniker in what might just be the most original experimental release of the year. While band comrade Dan McRae took us for a hike round the Antarctic with his 2004 solo album 'Eskimo', Ren chooses to let the listener's brooding imagination decipher the eight pieces he's presented, with no track titles or sleeve notes to give us any pointers. Think Sigur Ros' ( ) but less fey, more grown up and tinged with an altogether more unnerving mystique - in fact, the blurred snapshot of a grinning child etched onto the disc is the only evidence that a human being has had any involvement in piecing these cryptic sounds together.
Track one rises sharply from a pit of silence, kicking in like a warm sonic headrush. Dripping with dark ambience and lit only by Ren's swirling electric guitar, it effectively carries on from where Matica's closing track 'Last Generation' left off except tinted with a dreamlike confusion, bringing to mind an aquanaut's flickering consciousness during decompression sickness. This is a sign of things to come: a homegrown genre that shrugs off the stereotypes one by one as the project unfolds. 'Two' - a blend of shimmering synths and soft ambient thunder - sidesteps the ambient cliché by making expert use of some sublime mournful strings, exemplifying T'ien's mighty flair for the cinematic. Clearly Ren is relishing the opportunity to work without compromise and create some truly beautiful, fragile soundscapes. That's not to say that the record lacks any wallop; far from it. Things notch up a gear in the third piece, which locks together chords of malfunctioning fuzz, winds them around a monster beat and shows us just how easily Ti'en can toggle mood and direction. Likewise on 'Four', a more serene but equally passionate affair, coming across like a lonely radar singing its heart out through a dense shroud of fog. 'Six' is the quirkiest effort of all. Patches of bass and synth gently collide, while in the background we hear what sounds like the Predator asleep in jungle undergrowth. If you shut your eyes tight you can almost see Arnie's thermal signature as he leads his buddies to their grisly doom. For the penultimate track Ren shows us that despite his fascination with aural minutiae he is first and foremost a musician rather than just an FX junkie, able to tug on heartstrings with the best of them. Equal parts uplifting and melancholy, it's best described as a classical symphony received through a short-circuiting radio. The detail employed on this particular offering is so bizarre that there were points where I was convinced the laser on my CD player had packed up altogether. The record ends with a twenty-two minute retrospective coda: a flashback T'ien megamix which draws upon all the elements previously showcased and recycles them from finish to start in some thick pools of ambience. It's almost as if there's a warped mirror at the end of track seven that takes us right back to where we began, this time in a different language and along different paths.
Definitely a strong contender for the most unique conclusion to any electronica record I've heard so far. The collection as a whole smacks of a late-night brainstorming session between Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Christ (Boards Of Canada's eerie counterpart on Benbecula Records - not the revered religious icon), and has to be heard to be believed. Dave Ren has managed to negotiate the familiar pitfalls of most alternative/IDM experiments, namely fruitless meandering or getting tangled up in a maze of ennui, and produced one of the most consistently rewarding electronica releases this year. If bullshit-free nocturnal mind-expansion is your cup of tea then snap up a copy of T'ien before Hollywood fixes him in their sights.
CD available or down load from itunes and rawrip.com.
Other Stuff Ren has worked on:
Lien Matica http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum? id=152144132&s=143444
Lien Lien http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum? id=152847647&s=143444
www.rawrip.com/artist_site_new.php?sh_pg=pg_songs&UserID =23994
CDs available from http://www.shopsonic.com/music_by_record_label.php?id=38