Dylan Khotin-Foote has been bobbing between lo-fi house and moth-eaten ambient music for nearly a decade now. On four albums released between 2014 and 2020, the Canadian electronic musician known simply as Khotin established a remarkably consistent palette, not so much developing his style as sinking further into it, as one might into a well-worn yet exceptionally cozy sofa. He is fond of muffled drum hits, plush sub-bass, and washed-out pads from the Casio SK-1, a legendarily basic sampling keyboard from the 1980s. On his debut LP, Hello World, Khotin leaned heavily on vintage Roland drum machines and classic house grooves, but in the years since, he has slowed the tempo and thrown a thick blanket over the percussion without tinkering too much with the essence of his sound. His moods are as unvarying as his toolkit: dreamy, faintly distracted, and unmistakably bittersweet, yet filigreed with something resembling optimism.
Release Spirit, Khotin’s first album since 2020’s Finds You Well, follows a move from Vancouver back to his hometown of Edmonton, Alberta, but it’s difficult to discern what impact, if any, those 700 miles may have had on his music. A suggestion of childlike whimsy pervades the music; flutelike leads trace lazy circles in the air, and the squishy contours of his synths occasionally recall Play-Doh, or Silly Putty. Like Boards of Canada, he uses nearly subliminal tape-warping effects to vividly nostalgic ends, and autobiographical tidbits litter the album like yellowing snapshots you might peel from the pages of a spiral-bound photo album. In the opening “HV Road,” he digs out a recording from a family vacation at British Columbia’s Okanagan Lake, his younger siblings’ voices bleeding across the singing of crickets. (“Why are you recording again?” one of them asks with barely veiled disdain.) And “3 pz” borrows its oddly discombobulated, strongly accented spoken-language vocals (“You stained your suit… Oh my god, you stained your dress… This guy is so annoying—you annoy me, do you understand?”) from an English-language learners’ tape he found at the home of his grandparents, who immigrated from Russia in the 1980s.
The album’s pulses are practically cryonic, yet the music is surprisingly lively. Sluggish drum machines and languorous breakbeats are frequently threaded with silvery detailing and cascading metallic accents. In “Lovely,” a trim, bleepy arpeggio embroiders curlicues around a beat that trudges like boots in slush; in “Life Mask,” a calm landscape of Harold Budd-like piano and ambient birdsong is interrupted by rapidly spinning twisters of dub delay. Everywhere you listen, overlapping rhythms—unsteady tremolo effects, pitter-pat hi-hats, stuttering vocal samples—are spreading out and colliding, like ripples on the surface of a lake.
Some of the best tracks use the mercurial sound of the TB-303 as an organizing principle. “Home World 303” unrolls contrapuntal acid lines, one squelchy and one pinging; “Computer Break” tips a portamento lead into seesawing motion. It’s a smart addition to the playbook—music as hazy as Khotin’s benefits from a point of focus. Like his previous records, the wispy Release Spirit is so uniformly pretty that it doesn’t always leave a strong impression. But two tracks point to potential new directions for Khotin’s sound. “Techno Creep” starts out on Andy Stott’s chilly, torpid turf, but—warmed by Balearic guitar and new-age synths—it thaws and blooms as it goes, like a patch of Arctic tundra turning tropical. “Fountain, Growth” begins with a slow-motion acid-trance chug before the voice of Montreal’s Tess Roby comes fading into earshot, her reverberant sighs as blissfully enigmatic as the Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser. It’s a dream-pop distillation of the classic Khotin sound—and a suggestion that this master of atmosphere might have a future in actual songs.
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