Donato Dozzy

In which Italian techno maverick Donato Dozzy reworks material from US synth sorcerer Chris 'Bee Mask' Madak, generating seven serenely ambient, meticulously detailed themes that hark back to a more innocent, wide-eyed era of armchair exploration.

The two artists met at Japan's Labyrinth festival, and having been commissioned to do a single remix for Madak, Dozzy found himself so stimulated by what he had to work with that he came back with an hour's worth of material. Spectrum Spools decided the only reasonable course of action was to release it all as a double-album, displaying Dozzy's mastery of narrative.

'Vaporware 1' and 'Vaporware 07' deploy intricately arranged bell-tones, humid field recordings and magnificently forlorn string-pads calling to mind the mid-90s Apollo missions of John Beltran, Locust or Thomas Fehlmann. 'Vaporware 02' retains more of the DNA that runs through the Bee Mask bloodstream but the atmosphere is still one of rarified despondency; while the album's second half goes further into rhythmic kosmische, building up to the climactic arpeggios of 'Vaporware 07', a sincere articulation of IDM reminiscent of OG Black Dog or Kirk DeGiorgio in full space-flight.