Dublin-based Somadrone may share their name with a US rock band, but there the similarity ends. While the Massachusetts rock quartet trade in fiery metal, Neil O’Connor (whose other musical credits include The Redneck Manifesto and Connect Four Orchestra) specialises in instrumental elecronica so unobtrusive it’s almost transparent.
Fuzzing Away To A Whisper, O’Connor’s second album under the Somadrone moniker could easily be mistaken for a movie soundtrack, albeit a film in which nothing much happens and not very quickly either (the first album Let’s Depart is included here as a bonus disc, incidentally).
Combining moody moog synths with occasional strings (particularly cello) and vibraphone, this is so quiet you’ll hardly notice it’s on until track four, ‘Stand Up On It!’, the one composition here that sounds immediate, thanks to a rather insistent drum-beat that unfortunately peters out. Elsewhere, there’s the quietly beautiful opener, ‘Screen Test’, the strings taking the song to bizarre but interesting chamber electro territory, or the curiouys melodrama of ‘Horn Rimmed Lullaby’. All too often, however, Fuzzing… sounds like intro music, where you find yourself waiting for the song proper to kick in, but it never does.
Sometimes it’s pretty (the title track, for example, or ‘Intersection Ends’), but elsewhere (‘Ansicht Von Hiten’, ‘Composite Hum’) the atmospherics are more than a shade too esoteric.
Fuzzing Away To A Whisper isn’t bad, but ultimately there’s just not enough going on to lift it beyond the realms of background ambience. Music to meditate to, anybody?