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The Great Mundane: When Falls Arrive
Psymbolic Sounds

The Great Mundane's When Falls Arrive is more than just a pleasant surprise: DIY-producer Jeffrey Acciaioli weaves fifteen cuts into a solidly crafted travelogue of IDM-inflected instrumental hip-hop that goes down easily indeed. Par for the course, the beats are crisp but he brings an equal amount of attention to the tracks' melodic content and compositional structures. There's no shortage of collage-styled crate-digging on display too but Acciaioli arranges the elements into cohesive wholes where the bits (e.g., the bright piano flourish echoing throughout “The Great Escape”) are used in service to the whole. The level of imagination and resourcefulness impresses also: strip away the slippery rhythms punctuating the aggressive ostinato in “Collecting Rain” and you're left with a keyboard motif that could fit just as easily into a classical minimalism piece.

There's lots to dig into in Acciaioli's fully-developed cuts and sample-heavy interludes: jazz-hop Moroccan swing (“Bombs 2 Business”), laid-back funk-hop (“No Dumping in Jersey ”), and bouncy glitch-hop (“Worm Eaters”). “Neglecting Your Lover” nicely lays out his head-nodding style with a shape-shifting mix of acoustic bass lines, tight beats, and arcade melodies, and Acciaioli even works a samba feel into the heady Rhodes flow of “Disguising Discomfort.” Perhaps the strongest cut is “Chatter Box” which chops heads with pummeling bass buzz while its synth melodies inject a subtle shot of Boards Of Canada flavour into the mix. Prefuse 73 is an obvious reference but The Great Mundane's material is considerably less frenetic than Herren's, making When Falls Arrive a good introduction for those new to the genre.

September 2008