4 out of 5

Label: Orange

Produced by: D’Arcangelo

I’m having trouble finding much info on this early D’Arcangelo release, beyond its 1999 date, which puts it in interesting company, chronologically. The D’Arcangelo brothers – Fabrizio and Marco – started off in the late 90s producing rather abrasive IDM, eventually pushing outward into more experimental territory that maintained a throughline of melody. That is: beats and flow were always part of package, but the duo often prioritized a kind of distant chilliness to their sound that I came to love, as it made repeat listens more and more worthwhile as you dug in and heard nuance beneath a maybe harsher top layer. Zero to Zero fits in a funny place in that journey, as it’s very accessible for its time, hitting heavy on beats in a way that I don’t think the group leaned in to until the late 00s, while also kicking things off with an incredibly broken song that acts like it’s skipping for a good part of its runtime. Rather hilariously, the B-side then offers a remix of this track (from Andre Estermann) that embraces the big beats found elsewhere on the release, strategically taking the unmuxed rhythm from the song and letting it shine – as though the remix was the original, in a way.

There’s something about that that feels like it ties in to the title of the album and its same-named tune: after this weird, I-don’t-even-know-what-to-do-with-it-opener, we get a run of pure IDM bangers that rattle the speakers with blown out beats and fun, skittery synths, before the title track kicks off the B-side with… minimalism. It’s a bit of chilly ambience that would feel fitting on Shipwreck, their Rephlex debut, but is here defiant in the way the opening song is, in the sense that it refuses to break out, or really give us something to latch on to. Instead, that comes via a kind of bright, celebratory coda in followup song A25, before the aforementioned remix.

We thus start each side of the album with tracks that do play into D’Arcangelo’s distancing tactics, albeit applied oddly – resetting expectations to zero. Yeah, it’s a reach, but it really did make it so I wasn’t sure what mood to be in for the tracks that would follow, only to be instantly grabbed up by their beats or open sounds.

A key release in the D’Arcangelo brothers discography, showing off their skill early on at adapting their sounds to a wide range of electro styles and approaches.