Writing of the album Now Is back in 2022, we described how Rival Consoles, the project of London-based musician and producer Ryan Lee West, has developed a distinctively plastic sound across its fifteen-year lifespan. Drawing upon impressionist and electronic artists equally, likewise the sensibilities of IDM and classical music, West “work[s] at the intersection of the human and technological,” as we put it, “to explore what is lost and gained as the two overlap.” Now Is represented the most precise, controlled Rival Consoles release to date, mining minimalism for all of its potential uses and crafting a record able to portray a full spectrum of emotions with masterly restraint. “A sense of clarity developed via a central repetition,” as we wrote of the single ‘World Turns’. “Minimalism in the way of fine machinery. An elegant coherence to design.”
Now Rival Consoles is back with Landscape from Memory, a brand new full-length due to be released this summer by Erased Tapes, and the sense of evolution continues. The record developed slowly, following an uncharacteristic dormant period for the usually prolific artist. But perhaps that period of stasis was just what was needed, because the end result might be the project’s most impressive to date, focusing in on small details while retaining the grand sweeps of melancholy and euphoria too. This is due in part to the process of its creation, which saw West dive into ” a scrapbook of discarded audio snippets,” breathing life into the flashes of potential he discovered in primordial shards of melody. “There is a kind of strange beauty to [the process],” he describes, “because it involves the past, present and future in a very strong way.”
Lead single ‘Catherine’ illustrates this perfectly. Ostensibly a dance track, but suffused with far more nuance and emotion, the song is dedicated to his partner, and sounds more like the lonely memory of a dancefloor than a sweaty, packed one. “It’s extremely open, just like a naked melody on drums, so exposed as an idea,” West explains. “I think because she was so excited by it, I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m excited too, actually, I just didn’t realize.”
