Placid Angles
Canada
Oath
Listening to John Beltran’s Canada, the latest release from his long-running Placid Angles project, I found myself asking: why isn’t he one of electronic music’s most in-demand DJs? Whether he’s making second-wave Detroit techno under his own name or intricate IDM as Placid Angles, there isn’t a dud in his catalog. Need proof? Just thumb through his Discogs page, where even his 2019 album First Blue Sky is currently fetching upwards of £100. (Grabbing a copy of The Cry, his 1997 masterpiece for Peacefrog, might be a better investment than Bitcoin.)
With his CV, Beltran could certainly look to cash in as a legacy act (indeed, he should!), but his new records continue to push the envelope. 2022’s breakbeat-adjacent The Lotus for AD 93 explored melancholic, UK-flavored sounds, last year’s A Detroit Summer EP on Kalahari Oyster Cult dipped into dubby techno funk and now Canada represents another step forward. Sure, the LP has all the trappings of his prior Placid Angles releases (e.g. lush pads, daydreaming synth lines, skittering breaks, forlorn vocal samples), but it’s also his most detailed and hi-definition album to date.
Take a song like “We Cry With You.” It starts out as a fairly standard downtempo brooder, but in its second half, the breakbeats gradually expand into a full-on assault as Beltran douses the song in guitar chords and feedback. It’s like Kevin Shields wandered in halfway through an IDM track. Another high point is “Hero,” where plaintive pads give way to a syncopated UK garage rhythm that sounds like it’s made out of ping balls ricocheting off steel skyscrapers. Beltran has a knack for finding exciting new pockets of sounds, and also seems to draw additional creativity from the collaborations that dot Canada’s tracklist. “I Want What I Want,” a song made with Vancouver vocalist Sophia Stel, could put to shame any of the tracks featured in the recent “NTS Guide to: Trip Hop Revival,” and on “Wildfire,” Bristol producer of the moment Yushh shows up to help make a slinky, sexy saxophone stepper that’s primed for the afters. Beltran might be one of Michigan’s most overlooked producers, but Canada is another essential entry in his archive.
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