deru - trying to remember review from the igloomag.com Deru's latest release for Merck, Trying to Remember, manifests itself in a fog of particles, as a collection of songs that struggle to express themselves through veils of static and hazy sandstorms. The songs are the breakbeat equivalent of isotope decay -- charged ions rattling against a Geiger counter with random frequency as if the source of their expression was a wild mélange of radioactive elements, a heavy metal bouillabaisse. Filled with radio static and particles of blown sand, Trying to Remember is an obscurity of memory that suggests melody more than it is actively driven by it. "Spread Your Arms" is overrun with a gentle river of static while a single note melody pines with aching melancholy over a tiny ripple of chattering synthetics. It's the sound of the high desert sands trying to cover up a rusting piece of machinery that has lost its way. The machine struggles on towards its destination, servo-motors whining with the heat and the grit while internal alarms sound their distress with increasingly fainter calls. "The Reasons," a thirty-eight second explanation of the record, is nothing more than the processed sound of a windstorm blowing sand through an empty house. The opening of "Tapah" is a walk into the depth of the desert, past the dust devils and shifting dunes (the payoff of "Tapah" is the delicious oasis of rhythm and whispered voices that lives beyond that wall of dirt). "The Days Before Yesterday" is a Mobius strip of decrepit loops, struggling to bring themselves back into a cohesive sonic structure, but too much air has gotten into the works and the edges of the loops fragment and fracture with each iteration. The bell loops of "Only The Circle" close the record with their fading song against a rising hiss of static like sunlight dying across an expanse of wind-burned rock. The delight of Deru's record is that it takes the crackling focus of Pole's static and locks it into an echo chamber with delicate bell tone melodies and Merck's penchant for breakbeat, spinning everything into a slowly evolving windstorm of brushed noise and fragmented downtempo. Trying to Remember is desert chillout music to follow a wild night of tribal dancing across the hard sand of the arid plateau. The summoned spirits whisper through the night with tongues of sand. This is a gorgeous record. -Mark Teppo deru - trying to remember review from the splendidezine.com Now is certainly not the most auspicious time to be an IDM artist, at least in terms of press exposure and "Q" rating. Back in the late '90s, it could sometimes seem as if the whole concept of rock in the independent scene would be swallowed up beneath a wave of eerie, skittering beats created on laptops by turtleneck-clad ascetics. Remember Kid A? Many in the music press played up the Aphex Twin homages that Radiohead packed into that one as if it were the surrender in some guitars-versus-electronics war. Now, after everything seems to have moved toward a very different sort of equilibrium, artists like Deru can, unfortunately, be pigeonholed as practitioners of yesterday's genre, and therefore ignorable. But it is now, in the genre's maturity, that we can expect to hear some of the most intriguing variations on its themes -- and it is precisely these subtleties, these variations, that Deru delivers in spades. Though there are moments that are dominated by drum effects, and periods during which rhythm takes the front seat, Trying To Remember derives most of its personality from the long stretches in which the rhythm is subsumed, or simply glossed over in favor of the organic and glitchy sound effects that are the album's real focus. In fact, one of Trying's most drum-forward, conventional-techno moments, "Tapah", proves to be the disc's weakest link: without the smooth, flowing delivery of crackling IDM effects and cool, cool organs, the singular pleasure of listening to Deru tends to get lost in the mix. It's better to focus on a track like "The Days Before Yesterday", where the beat structure seems to hesitate, to worry about getting in the way of everything else that's going on in the piece. Deru has a way of altering the volume of a given sound within the mix so that it seems to fade up, or back, and in so doing he creates the sort of variation-through-repetition that was a mainstay of music back in the seventeenth century. Is this the intent? You wouldn't think so, but the comparison may well say something about the continuum of what works in music: Deru's work is strongest when, ignoring the piles and piles of equipment, the million upon million sounds that he can generate, he focuses on finely tuned manipulation of just a few variables. Take, for example, opener "I Don't Know You", which kicks off on a long, ringing chime of the variety that conveys distance or memory to the listener. From out of that distance, noises start to fade in, one at a time. By the time the rhythm filters in, layers of skittering static, eerie organ tones, vocal snippets and other ephemera have already been well established. The effect, eventually, is of a rhythm that can't start up properly. The snare hits are dissolved and spread across the static, while the rest of the music curls around and envelops them. Certainly, start-stop rhythms and totally undanceable dance beats are far from a rarity in the IDM scene, but Deru has a way of making the melodic and/or noisy portions of the mix seem to converse with the rhythms. It's a subtle skill, but in the IDM world it's often the subtleties that define a given artist's style. As a statement of individual aesthetics, Trying To Remember is a nuanced and impressive album that will, hopefully, find the ears of some listeners who are interested in hearing great, thoughtful work. -- Brett McCallon deru - trying to remember review from the orlando weekly If the abstract, processed warmth on Trying To Remember had a color, it'd surely be gray – the soft, cerebral gray of brain tissue at work, saving, transferring and re-examining thoughts, suffering glitches, losing focus. Deru (aka L.A.'s Ben Wynn) at first listen seems to embody a dozen 1990s electronic artists; several spins later, planting influence flags is nearly impossible. Incubating, cavernous tones ponder and dissipate over the buzz & sizzle of digital static on "I Don't Know You." "Words You Said" is busier, less cozy, its decaying note-swells full of crackle-clatter, riddled with tricky neat bursts. "Only the Circle" transmits tranquility from within a clear glass bubble, massaged into a coma by Oval-ish, distorted micro-tides and bongo-raindrop synths. By Raymond Cummings deru - trying to remember review from Grooves 16 & textura Deru (Ben Wynn) adopts a structurally more conventional approach on Trying To Remember, his Merck successor to 2003's Pushing Air (Neo Ouija). There's little that's conventional about Deru's hallucinatory, portentous sound, however, which emphasizes dense textures and downtempo hip-hop beats that curdle and scrape. Wynn's pieces float dreamily with phantom whispers, muffled bell tones, and soft electric piano burble piercing through dense strata of crackle and industrial noise. Representative of the album's spectral sound, “Words You Said” weaves haunting piano figures into a viscous slab of static and smears, while “Noru” merges tactile clatter and throbbing rhythms with blistered tones. Trying To Remember subtly merges electronic detritus with hip-hop beats in a nuanced and fresh hybrid. deru - trying to remember review from loop.cl Deru [aka L.A.'s Ben Wynn] Deru Angels publishes his second album for Merck. He did the first LP ‘Pushing Air’ in 2003 in the English Neo Ouija imprint. In addition he did a remix for Tiki Obmar and made some appearances in compilations released on Delikatessen and in the third volume of the series ‘Clicks & Cuts’ on Mille Plateaux. In general this is a delicate album, but sometimes not so accommodating because it shows his noisier facet as on ‘Words you said’: a complex of clicks, mechanical sounds and in a sly form a background of brimming ambience. This latter Deru uses in almost all the cuts alongwith fractured rhythm and hip-hop beats like on ‘Tapah’ that also has the ethereal voice of Kate Conklin, and as on ‘The day before yesterday’. Other notable here is ‘Only the circle’ - that complete this CD, it holds a kind of musical box synth that unfolds in a very quiete space. Text Guillermo Escudero

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