Album Review: Echoes Of Home

Electronica offers no escapism for me. It’s more of what I already have.

Stapled to this desk, in this office job, my life is already a series of repeating and building loops. Maybe I don’t trip enough – be that walking, driving, or illicitly – to have a time slot for electronic music in my daily life.

But then I haven’t really heard electronica like this before.

Each of Sanoi’s Echoes Of Home’s 8 tracks (not counting the 4 re-imagined versions) is a mini-sojourn through a different space. Each track a trip, the album a journey. The landscape slowly shifting and subtly changing around you.

While retaining the rise, drop, and fall typical of the genre, it’s the spaces between them that differentiate Sanoi’s dreamscapes. Occasionally esoteric – or even absent – beats carve out jagged mountains, coated by a rich dusting of harmonic layers, surrounded by a swelling haze of sub-arctic ambience, and interspersed with haunting, yet very human, piano melodies. The sparse vocals passing by and trailing off like a soft breeze. Organic textures adorn the soundscapes, with threads of noise coming from every angle, holding and guiding you.

Listening, you are no longer part of the industrial machine. You are elsewhere, in another space. Like a collection of short stories, like a Bob Ross canvas, or the soundtrack to a film so artistic Wes Anderson would convulse and weep.

It’s not like the angry techno of my teen years, where it felt like a race to make the biggest boom. Back when the greatest test of a new stereo system was if it handled The Chemical Brothers’ “Under The Influence” without blowing out a tweeter or sub.

No. Sanoi’s Echoes Of Home feels more sophisticated. Like the soundtrack to that one coffee shop where they’re not baristas, they’re artists, and caffeine comes by the carafe. Though, with its immersive stereo mixing, it’s better suited for a pair of headphones and a quiet corner than house speakers in a dance hall, or an industrial inspired retail space.

It will be interesting to hear how Echoes Of Home plays live, which is usually the domain of this type of music. It’s a genre designed to make you move. While initially sceptical, in its recorded form it’s more enjoyable listening from beneath an Excel spreadsheet than I imagined dance music could be.

Listening to it from the comfort of your own home, feeling yourself transported, and appreciating its meticulous production is probably a better experience, especially for the rhythmically challenged like myself. Echoes Of Home is an expertly crafted art piece worthy of the praise it has been receiving from the student radio network and further afield.

You can find Echoes Of Home on the Sanoi Bandcamp.