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Cold Light - Coldtron2
Peak Oil sublabel FO returns with a gorgeous debut LP of late night air-fried trip hop from Cold Light, flocking like moths to an illbient flame tipped FFO Jabu, Tricky, Sleepdial, Shell Company, Space Afrika. Cold Light are Bristol’s Birthmark & Withdrawn, Portland’s Best Available Technology, Rael & Eldon out of London, and Hungarian CSNL. Some half a decade after a ‘Live at the Laundromat’ tape introduction, the collective unveil ‘Coldtron 2’, a sparingly sensuous slant on the no-person’s-land between trip hop, smoked-out dub soul and illbient jazz tones, also inflected with the voices of Irish psych-folk artist Elaine Malone, Akeko and British-Nigerian sound designer Tony Onuchukwu. With remarkable restraint - especially considering so many hands are on board - they keep everything pared-back to creaking, atmospheric fundamentals for 40 minutes of smouldering storytelling, passing the torch across chapters of zoot-end poetic monologues, from stylised rap to spoken word, in a spectrum of accents speaking to the group’s far flung coordinates. Call it downbeat neo-noir or trip hop 2.0, the sound is clearly in thrall to the ‘90s OGs - Tricky, Portishead, Massive Attack - yet gauzily distinguished from its forebears by the production’s pall of dematerialised textures and an enervated feel for screwed dubstep and glimmers of sounds that emerged in trip hop’s fall-out. The Bristol night air is thick with sferic crackle and diffused sax in ’Smoke Signal’ thru the Memotone-esque eldritch of ‘Troposphere Test’, taking in a tacit nod to Mobb Deep via Tricky on the smouldering ‘Riot’, or even Civilistjävel!’s low-key electrodub in ‘Lean Wid It…’, and Sleepdial’s slurred drums on ‘I’ve Known Fires’. But they’re most potent on ‘Fields in B’ with eight mins of smudged Rhythm & Sound steppas bass anchoring the bluest sax plumes and blunted bars, ideal for ashtray dreamers.
