Och – Dicken’s Tracks review

With early support from Zip, Ame and Dan Curtin, it’s clear that Och aka UK producer Dicken Lean has something special going on. Indeed, this release on Baby Ford’s label seems to combine the best elements from a range of influences. Lead track “Bombay Bedbath” has the same organic drums and rolling tom toms as Ford’s own productions, but sounds looser, more freeform. Combined with ominous chords and a woozy hook that could both have been reconstituted from a long-forgotten rave release, this strangely familiar yet idiosyncratic arrangement is completed by a breathy, insistent female vocal.

Lean probes the current fascination for ambience on “Interlude Intuitive”, although his vision appears to have been coloured by Jeff Mills’s abstractions rather than the du jour crackle and hum of Throbbing Gristle. This sets the scene nicely for “Out Of Key In”. Once again, Lean focuses on the use of rolling, dense drums, but rather than sounding flat and monochrome, they come across as fat and loose. To this backdrop he copper-fastens spooky piano keys, and proceeds to run them in and out of an unidentified effect. Irrespective of what he does, the end result is a psychedelic house jam that should be filed close to Perlon and far removed from mnml mush.

Richard Brophy