Unknown Mobile
Field Work
Pacific Rhythm
Unknown Mobile (a.k.a. Levi Bruce) made his name as one of the seemingly endless pool of producers who emerged from the Vancouver house scene. His early releases turned out the sort of hazy, feel-good jams that in the 2010s were as ubiquitous as the fog hanging over the city’s coastline, and like many of his contemporaries (e.g. Khotin, Jack J), he appeared to be more interested in patchouli-scented chillout rooms than banging it out on a Funktion-One soundsystem. On his 2019 record for Pacific Rhythm, Daucile Moon, for instance, Bruce teamed up with CFCF and turned recycled MIDI files into strange new age meditations.
Seven years later, he returns to Pacific Rhythm, and his circumstances have changed rather significantly. Having relocated to Whitehorse, the capital city of the Yukon in Northern Canada, his music has become even more elemental and pared down. You could still catch a bit of a groove on Daucile Moon, but on Field Work, you have to squint to catch sight of Bruce’s trademark ear for melody. This isn’t a bad thing. These are delicate tunes built around place-based field recordings, and when you give yourself over to their serene expanses and subtly shifting textures, they are also some of the most beautiful songs in the Unknown Mobile catalog.
The field recordings sit center stage, with little flecks of melody seeming to emerge from Bruce’s chosen landscape. “Basalt,” for example, is made from recordings pulled from a Marin County beach. (As a Northern California native currently living in Glasgow, the tune made me instantly homesick.) The lapping waves and wind give way to a gossamer piano line that captures the austere beauty, rocky sand and too-cold-to-really-be-here feeling endogenous to Bay Area beaches. On “Galterö,” a song made with Rob Dickson, there is slightly more happening—namely, they add strings and a guitar line—but even these sounds seem to emanate static-laced haze of the field recordings at its core.
All that said, Field Work’s reliance on field recordings doesn’t mean the album is merely a collection of chirping birds and babbling rivers. “Dachgeschosswohnung” uses samples captured on a Berlin rooftop, and between its synthetic wash of chords and the addition of an almost-kick drum, the tune feels like the soundtrack to an eerie Blade Runner cityscape. On a more playful note, Bruce transforms a recording from a hot dog stand into a slanted piece of Wisdom Teeth-style IDM on “Korv Kiosk.” What other artist could do that, or would even think of the idea in the first place? What ultimately makes Field Work really interesting is the varied nature of Bruce’s source material, and the creative way he puts that material to good use.
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