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MojoDec 17, 2012If the initial listening experience challenges, long-term exposure unfurls Instrumental Tourist's full beauty. [Jan 2013, p.91]
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The WireDec 5, 2012A return visit for these two tourists would be welcome. [Nov 2012, p.60]
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Nov 19, 2012Their warring improvisations are intriguing, unsettling and often exquisite.
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Nov 19, 2012On 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.
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Dec 19, 2012This is music that needs to be felt rather than simply heard.
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Nov 30, 2012It's an enjoyable detour, one that affirms how well these producers have honed their approaches to sound.
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Dec 5, 2012It'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.
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Nov 27, 2012As pure listening experience, Tourist's mazelike structure, full of echoes and switchbacks, best lends itself to listening on shuffle.
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Nov 26, 2012In 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.
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Nov 21, 2012They're not concerned with clunky subgenres or fitting into anyone's neat little boxes. With Instrumental Tourist, it is what it is.
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Nov 20, 2012All 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.
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Nov 19, 2012Instrumental 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).
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Nov 19, 2012As 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.
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Nov 19, 2012And 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.
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Nov 19, 2012Despite 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.