4 out of 5

Label: Un Je-Ne-Sais-Quoi

Produced by: Brice Kartmann (mastered by)

Three tracks of minimalist but musical drone, done via ambience and electronic noise, the prodigiously releasing The Dictaphone somewhat does a double take on the album name by setting up something somewhat impenetrable that becomes, indeed, quite fun as it opens up.

“Fun’s” three tracks are named for their durations, doubling down on the album’s layering of complexity and accessibility. Opener FUN756 suggests strapping in for something slow and atmospheric; high-pitched bleeps alert us to a change as we go along, and this gets stitched on to in varying ways until you realize you’re into a more comparatively traditional electro track, albeit its beat buried somewhere else – the listener discovers their own rhythm through being dialed in to the looping and building repetitions.

Closer FUN1925 is a brilliant ante-up of this formula, starting even more sparse and then exploding into a legit beat somewhat closer to older Dictaphone grooves, making the journey through the album absolutely worth it. Sandwiched between these is FUN826, which is a bit more of a sine wave of quiet and loud, and thus logical as a hop from one more comparatively linear song to another, but at 8+ minutes, that can be a relatively long hop without much “new” added to the album’s templates.

Regardless, this is a much more engaging listen than the initial crawl of atmospheric sound proposed, and doesn’t require a lot of patience to get to that realization – the album’s emotiveness is pretty apparent as soon as that first track gets going in earnest.