From Berlin producer Aparde (real name Paul Camillo Rachel) comes a stunning debut in ten stains. On Glass, Aparde roots his sound in textured percussion (including literal sampled glass), thoughtful piano themes, and deliberate use of negative space. He provides his own warm vocals on many of the tracks and harmonizes with ANËKIN on lead single "Mouth" (download available via XLR8R).
The video, produced by Aparde himself (he's also a visual artist) and cinematographer Sandra Puchner, follows in the theme of shielded vulnerability, with its human subjects obscured by what appears to be fogged, increasingly dirt-covered, and/or otherwise-rendered translucent glass. And it, much like the rest of the album, is emotionally shattering: "Forget all that I've told you / I have nothing more to give" is the haunt this song ends on after a sparse, repeated verse.
From start to finish, the front-loaded Glass stays instrumentally adhesive, but certain elements like the entrance of a breakbeat leading to polyrhythms on "Sober" and the title track's confession that Aparde "sees [his] life through milky glass" offer the listener an object of focus and clarity in an airy landscape reminiscent of past works by atmospheric contemporaries Jon Hopkins and Max Cooper.
Glass is out today, October 13 via Ki Records, a label founded by producer Christian Löffler, whose Mare Reworks first introduced me to Aparde. From this year's heavy rotation list, here's "Youth":