Instrumental Tourist

A return visit for these two tourists would be welcome. [Nov 2012, p.60]

Their warring improvisations are intriguing, unsettling and often exquisite.

On these songs, Lopatin and Hecker take the sounds in their intentionally limited palette to places they may never have been expected to go, and the journey is intriguing and frequently lovely.

This is music that needs to be felt rather than simply heard.

It's an enjoyable detour, one that affirms how well these producers have honed their approaches to sound.

It's pleasant, unsurprisingly enough, in both its sonic direction and minimal production, but it lacks the sense of overwhelming purpose usually found on both artists' solo records.

As pure listening experience, Tourist's mazelike structure, full of echoes and switchbacks, best lends itself to listening on shuffle.

In Instrumental Tourist, Hecker and Lopatin have struck upon a secret chord, traced sacred geometries, and laid a foundation sturdy enough to build upon. It's sound as structure, structurally sound.

They're not concerned with clunky subgenres or fitting into anyone's neat little boxes. With Instrumental Tourist, it is what it is.

All in all, Instrumental Tourist offers more proof that these two are undisputed masters in their field, regardless of how necessary a collaborative effort like this really is anyway.

Instrumental Tourist is an attempt to cleanse the listener of "urban discontinuity" and experience the world as a passenger (something that's lost on a generation so used to being in control).

As sublime as much of Instrumental Tourist is, it rarely fulfills that promise of improvisation, of a real sonic engagement or play, and struggles to exceed the sum of its parts.

And while there's no percussion in any conventional sense, the likes of "Uptown Psychedelia" jerk manically to their own spasmodic rhythms. Yet where those tracks are marked by an almost feverish nervous tension, from "Racist Drone" onwards Hecker and Lopatin seem to drift into an almost tranquilised state-one which strays closer to ambient clichés.

Despite scattered flashes of brilliance, too often it's an album that feels unambitious, as though it's content to dwell in the middle ground where the two producers' back catalogs intersect rather than forge something new.

While wildly uneven and far from either's strongest work, Instrumental Tourist does have its moments of inspiration.

Instrumental Tourist can quickly feel like an experience of diminishing returns, as I began to pick out all my favorite bits and wait anxiously for those as the waves I had to surf to get there and back became more and more of a sort of test.

Is it less than the sum of its parts? Perhaps. However, it is an ambitious and interesting album that not only plugs the gap nicely between Tim Hecker and Oneohtrix Point Never albums but signals interesting things to come from Lopatin's SSTUDIOS series.

Tourist could have benefited from more calculation and an emphasis on the things that have paid dividends for these guys in the past.

There are enough fragments of warped interference to ensure this is a worthy collaboration albeit one which doesn't entirely muscle up to the canon of its individual progenitors.

This is a missed opportunity, but it's commendable that when both parties are not at their strongest the results can still satisfy.

Instrumental Tourist is unlikely to be viewed as anything more than an unimposing footnote between solo records.