CADENZA14

Tick tock, you don't stop: presenting Anticlockwise, the debut album from Digitaline, aka the Swiss duo of Gregorythme and Laps. After their debut single Rubicube, released in 2005 on Cadenza Records (Cadenza 7), Anticlockwise is the label’s first attempt towards a more comprehensive view on the creative production of the duo.

Digitaline have honed their craft with extensive stage experience. Performing locally at institutions like Zürich's Street Parade and the legendary Dachantine, and internationally at clubs like Panoramabar, Fabric, Rex and Cocoon, the pair has flipped their groovy, minimalist studio experiments into a kick-ass live show that's as "mega" as its details are "micro."

It's probably not surprising that Digitaline are Swiss: you don't find timekeeping this diamond- sharp anywhere else. But if their structures move like clockwork—precise configurations of smooth arcs, straight lines and right angles, like a black- and-white Mondrian—what they fill in around the grid is anything but rigid.

Spontaneity and flux are key. Bright harmonics shower everything in sparks, and tiny plaintive sounds plunge like diving birds. Drum tuning and delay timing are in constant motion; everything modulates everything else. These aren't the ubiquitous clicks and glitches of minimal, but something far more inspired. Fans of Akufen and Pantytec will recognize in Digitaline a similar sense of color: dynamic, chameleonic, irisdescent.

But it's not just the sound design. Digitaline's beats offer a sense of groove that's frankly irresistible, a classic jacking vibe kitted out in alien tones and melodies that dance on the edge of melancholy. Informed by their live sets, Digitaline's sense of structure balances compact, efficient rhythms and the long, sprawling arc: not so much psychedelic as narrative—narrative at its most surreal.

This is epic house at its most understated: not overblown drama but a modest tale passed mouth to mouth, bar to bar.

This is fireside funk: a new kind of drumming for a new kind of tribe.