3 out of 5

Label: Central Processing Unit

Produced by: Gianluigi Di Costanzo

My electronic music education doesn’t run very deep.  It’s Rephlex, and then whatever Rephlex has led me to.  Central Processing Unit, with a very purposeful Rephlex-recalling stable of artists, has proven wonderfully consistent with their output, not to mention landing on an art style that’s just so damned appealing to me.  But I’m still, after all of these years, an incredible noob, so I’m always caught off guard by when a release of theirs sells out right away, sending me reading about whichever person’s apparently ninety year long history of music of which I’ve been unaware, and then, of course, I get pretty hyped about listening to their CPU disc or LP, which I’ve blindly preordered.

That was the path with Bochum Welt’s Seafire: a sell out release; I find out they had some Rephlex work I’d never heard; I can’t wait to listen.  Putting on the LP, I had to give myself a check, because this was ambient, which, though I own a lot of CPU, what I do own pulls more from the IDM side of things, so this was unexpected.  Not a bad thing, as I dig some ambient as well, although digging in to Seafire, I was wondering if I was missing something.  It listens like a very slight release, with short track times and a fair amount of reuse from track to track.  Cuts would just end or fade out, like they were sketches instead of full compositions, and then there’s a sudden turn toward beats on the last few B-side tracks that just doesn’t sit well.  Poking around, another reviewer seemed to feel the same way, going further to point out that some of this stuff might have been taken from previous Bochum releases.

So had this sold out just based on hype of a returning name?

Giving the album more time to work, it’s more effective than my first few listens suggested.  Welt’s – Gianluigi Di Costanzo’s – restraint is impressive on the ambient tracks, with titles like Southern England in Summer setting the tone for a kind of background music to walks around town.  The mode is generally for a heartbeat with some affectations, but I came to appreciate the short runtimes, as Di Costanzo prevents his simple presentations from running thing in this manner, allowing us to shift on to the next two or three minutes of tones and emotions.  Color Me, in two minimally different versions, leads off both sides, and this does seem to be a hint, in a way: listened to as one album, it does get notably repetitive, with the ambient tracks losing their identity around the midway point.  But listened to as halves, A-side being a morning drive, B-side being, perhaps, a night on the town, it makes sense.

Seafire isn’t a standout release, by any means, and perhaps had I been waiting for a Bochum Welt album of originals, I’d be more disappointed.  But as my first exposure to the artist, it’s intriguing, if a little underwhelming.