Wake is the Oakland-based producer Michael Ahern Hettich, and his upcoming EP Wildest Of Places is due out July 31st via Proximal Records. Following up on the stoned ambiance of his Oakland Blackouts EP, the musician returns with this more dance oriented effort. Utilizing a live hardware set-up and custom software that allowed him to “improvise and tweak pre-determined semi-generative synth and drum patterns”, Wake reports:
“I combined these probability based instruments with samples and sequences written using Ableton Live & Renoise Traker, and played these tunes over and over until I could repeat-perform the same song more than once, but was still able to stretch and improvise structure and melodic content.”
Eventually the tracks on Wildest Of Places were recorded live at 1015 Folsom, a club in San Francisco, and later edited down by the artist to fit this EP length release.
Title track “Wildest of Places” wastes no time in leveling dance floor obliterating rhythms, as a mechanized bass drum stamps out a robotic beat over oily snares. Meanwhile, sinister machines seem to throb and churn, as though preparing to square off in some epic Survival Research Laboratories’ dance battle to the death.
