You could be forgiven for mistaking Rhadoo for the kind of guy that
thinks he has all the time in the world. After all, his music—like the
four tracks on this, his first EP for Cadenza—watches no clock
(except possibly the timer that tells him when the vinyl is about to
run out). Nine minutes, 12 minutes, 13, 13 and a half… His tracks are
the opposite of hurried. They're languorous, luxurious, positively
decadent. Stretching out atop a cushion of velvety beats, his music
caresses infinity in every repetition.
With Dor Mit Oru, Rhadoo follows through on
that promise, throwing the doors wide open
with the sly fury of a benevolent Pandora.
The double EP is nothing if not ambitious,
featuring four long, evolving tracks that
forego gimmicks in favor of a deeper kind of
engagement. What upon first listen sounds
minimal, thanks to a familiar palette of
treated percussion, slight harmonic
squiggles, and not much else, reveals itself
to be far denser, deeper, and more
nuanced. Unusually hypnotic, Rhadoo's
tracks blindfold the listener, spinning you
round like a dervish, until dizziness dissolves
into pure weightlessness.
What makes Rhadoo's grooves so different?
It's impossible to put your finger on, but it has
something to do with his curious sense of
timekeeping. His beats flex with the twitchy
fallibility of human muscles. His melodic
phrases stretch far beyond the familiar
confines of the four-bar loop, unfurling to fill
space in a way seemingly without
measure. Insistent, almost tribal patterns
are atomized into boundless orbits. It also
has something to do with Rhadoo's
approach to sound, fusing the reassuring
warmth of acoustic percussion with the
shimmering timbres of the digital
imagination, as though threading catgut
and horsehair with pixel pearls.
For all its underlying complexity, Rhadoo's
music is unusually immediate: these are
songs for the dance, after all, as
welcoming as a familiar face behind the
decks. Welcome to Rhadoo's world.