“This album comes at a time when I have begun fatherhood and all the life changes that go along with it.”
Dedicated to his wife and daughter, Dot Dash is the second full-length album by Oakland producer Jerod S. Rivera. After a couple years of creative blocks, Rivera says engaging with a Buchla 200e analog modular system helped inspire him to apply new ways of exploration to his established ways of music-making. He also collaborated with fellow local musicians Cat Laguian of Cone Shape Top (on “Seamstress Clock”), Elias Agogo (on “Rec-Rec”), Jonathan James Carr, and DJML.
The resulting work is a profound ambient techno soundscape. While the sound sources are largely electronic (save for some shakers, saxophone, and chimes), each track evolves organically, crawling or plodding along like some imaginary forms of life. Opening piece “Character Development” is soft and flitting, like leaves falling in a grove on a clear winter day. Then there’s “Motion Studies” and “Dot Dash” with the perfect timekeeping tick-tock-tick-tock of electronic music unhidden—but draped with lullaby-like keyboard melodies and sudden textural sound effects. One could fall asleep to this in the shady afternoon, or one could engage directly with its fullness, pondering the passage of time, the emergence of life, the creation of new forms.
