Cease To Matter CD

It's a brave producer - particularly one with such a long career behind him - who calls an album Cease To Matter. But then Burnt Friedman, active since the mid 1990s, isn't your average electronic musician. Happily, the album in question, his first with occasional collaborator Daniel Dodd Ellis, is one of his strongest in recent years. For the most part, it impressively fuses Dodd Ellis's Moodymann-ish spoken word vocals - some inspired by Aldous Huxley's LSD-inspired book Brave New World - to Friedman's unconventional, IDM-influenced dub rhythms and baked downtempo textures. The results are predictably spacious and otherworldly, with sublime piano motifs winding their way around dub basslines, sparse electronics and atmospheric vocals.