Multi-instrumentalist Derrick Stembridge lies behind this synth lover’s dream. Fallto opens with the soundtrack-style instrumental, Without Time, awash with fizzing, orchestral synth lines painting sweeping ambient landscapes – a gorgeous opener for synth addicts.
Stembridge’s influences are fairly obvious, the title track lives and breathes Apex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works, although the vocoded vocals – used often throughout the album, place the track within a more traditional, song-based format. However, the other half of Stembridge is unmistakeably provoked by the EBM genre, Unknown Divide surprises for its aggressive percussion and doom-laden synth pads, which verge on industrial-sounding at times, but seem a little out of place in the overall context of the album, even if Fallto switches between reverb-lashed ethereal landscapes and clubby EBM almost continuously.
Chameleon, with its incomprehensible vocoded vocals gliding ruefully over melodic keyboards, jagged mechanical pulses and toughened beats, again leans strongly towards the old-fashioned EBM genre. Two remixes of the track are provided, by Drev and 3l3tronic’s more contemporary IDM remix.
Personally, I find this Drifting In Silence project more consumable when it swings towards the ambient/IDM side, then you can sit back and dissect Stembridge’s complex arrangement of multiple synthesiser passages. The anthemic Closure is perhaps the best proof that a full-on ambient/ethereal album would have been more palatable than Fallto’s gregarious mixture of styles. When Stembridge chooses dense layers and airy soundscapes, Fallto sounds relevant and contemporary, when it leans towards EBM it quickly becomes passé.
