Spectreview: Brin – Water Sign

Released: October 15, 2021

Electronic
(Experimental)
(Ambient)
(Field Sounds)

-TEAL-

For a guide to the review color rating system, click here.

Colin Blanton (aka Brin) is an oddball, at least compared to the typical LA-based producer. He designs a great deal of his works as purposefully fractured journeys; what once might have been whole ambient or instrumental hip-hop tracks flitter across the eras like shattered mirror pieces, like a rocky road deformed by too many tires. Though the contexts may change across his records – as in Homescreen Glow’s breaking vaporwaves or Bliss Place’s umbral lo-fi – the approach remains largely the same.

Where Brin’s previous works bore some recognizable relation to a trend in electronic music, however, Water Sign feels distinctly elemental, like a GAS record run through a wood chipper. The experimental producer’s newest record is all rapid-splatter drums and aqueous textures, samples of rain and waterfalls running across each track’s sharp percussive edges. It’s more boldly out-there than what we’ve heard recently from him, and that might make it a challenging listen for those who expect something a little less frantic. But what Water Sign bears no shortage of is adventure, albeit one where its twists and turns are less transportive than transpositional.

Consequently, the best moments occur when Brin gives the listener enough room to discern exactly what it is he’s transposing. “Ininland’s” central sample of running water anchors the track’s pachinko plinks and hollow sōzu taps, as if it were an inversed panacean version of Laurel Halo’s “The Sick Mind”. “Thru Fluid Harp” bottles a storm of titular plucks until it decays mildly (note the Silent Hill clip at the end), while “Body Temp Infinite” functions like a cryogenic chamber where each chiming beat becomes a delicate, frosty exhale on clear glass. A delta forms near its end, where “Pure Skulls,” “Relaxation (Version)” and the seven-minute “Necklace” reiterate what Brin does best: long, formless pieces that inspire quiet meditation.

Maybe all Brin wants here is to simply appreciate sensory purity, or plainly consider the chaos/stillness dichotomy that water inhabits. Or, perhaps, the water sign itself is what’s most at play here: the zodiac sign under Neptune is normally aligned with creativity, dreams and boundless imagination, and there’s no question Water Sign has that in spades. But where there’s certainly no dearth of uniqueness here, the results struggle a little to attach to the ears, maybe because of their ungraspable natures. “Water Sign” introduces us to the record’s aural liquidity but does little more, while “Piscean Tumble” feels like a winking, surface-level approximation of the sign in question and “Instant Sorcery (Morning Light)” flickers in and out of the sphere of attention. I hesitate to assert this as an error though, because water itself is ungraspable. Just as each breath flows and out of the body autonomously, so does this record flow through the ears, its motion dictated only by its own set of dynamics.

Recommended for handheld aquariums.