Surprisingly, Russian tape-house producer AL-90 has not released an album since the start of the pandemic. His most recent releases are from 2019; the smooth and giftedly harmonic Watersport567 and the richly resonant collaboration with Monokle, titled Mindperfection. However, this hasn't caused him to drop off my radar, and has, in fact, resulted in me spending a fair amount of time with one of his earlier LPs, Murmansk-60. The 2018 album is named for his base of operations (the Port of Murmansk), and I would hazard to say that it represents the peak of his established style up to that it debuted. Lofi and moody, harboring mixed-under basslines and rhythmic guitars, drawn out in phantasmagoric strands from beyond the shadows of perception by a driving club beat. Murmansk-60 is like the soundtrack to a haunted highlights reel of a sea-side disco that burnt down the night after the revelries it housed were captured on tape. The mix speeds up and distends at worrying intervals, sounding like it is about to snap and usher forth a hush of silence. However, it never does... one of the striking characteristics of AL-90's music on this album is how sturdy it feels, despite the strain he puts it under. This steadiness is internal though, skeletal and sometimes even metaphysical in nature. It serves to maintain the music's impelling forcefulness, but it leaves the borders and moment-to-moment shapes of the music blurry and ill-defined, and subject to radical transformation without concern for its effect on the listener. It's kind of like a VHS player that edits the film you're watching as it plays- taking scenes out of order and rearranging the narrative against conventions of human logic, confounding character motivations and making enigmas out of epiphanies. There is a reason behind AL-90's vicious but inspired interpolations of sound on Murmansk-60; it's just not reasoning that can be deciphered without peering through the blizzard of static within one's own soul.
