Since the music on it is so full of precise, staccato notes, all of it built with such a lucidity, it’s hard to reconcile this tape’s title “Blurred Tunnels” with what I’m hearing — nay — experiencing. The “tunnels” part I get, the Portland-based synth-scaper an architect of a long and winding celestial conduit, complete with little flashing lights whizzing by your eardrums. The sheer pacing of the notes, those rapid-firing arpeggios and octave-oscillations is enough to define the walls and their elegant curvatures. But this stuff is far from blurry, at least on the surface. Dig your way past the blinks of tone, let the resulting swathe envelope your mind, and dream-like qualities do make their way into your world. Still, those conjured images come with a certain vitality and vibrant clarity that’s tough to ignore. Grapefruit doubles-down on the effort here by veering into some sweet ballad-esque material in addition to the quicker-paced stuff described in my previous sentences, giving his sound (which was well introduced on a brilliant debut tape via Field Hymns sometime last year) a whole new space to roam around in. Some of the pieces end too abruptly, though, as if a blood cell is getting caught in a clot after speeding its way through an otherwise totally open vain. Those moments aren’t nearly enough to detract from the undeniable greatness that is Grapefruit, though, but it is evidence that this guy has yet to create something that resembles a defining statement. That must be just around the corner, but in the meantime, Blurred Tunnels gets whatever job I needed doing in the retro-futuristic synth realm (occupied by others like Event Cloak, Belarisk, Brain Fruit, Ou Où, et. al.) done nicely.
More about: Grapefruit
