With releases on plenty of labels such as Silent Season, Taka Noda AKA Mystica Tribe has been making his own brand of digital dub with his instrument of choice the melodica since 2011. On the other side of the world, Danny Wolfers AKA Legowelt AKA many, many more names has been producing all kinds of electronic music since the 90s, with countless gems hidden in his enormous discography. Tascam Space Season is sure to be another.
Both artists are legends in their own right, so when they linked up in December 2021 the result could have only been a work of genius, and Noda & Wolfers have delivered. Throughout this album, we see the two producers building off of each other’s strengths for a delightful tour of globally sourced dub tracks pulling from Japanese melodies, Jamaican reggae, and hazy strains of European electro, all flooded by watery delay effects and woozy tape manipulations.
‘Supernatural Mixing Desk’ opens with carefree mood, its breezy melodica floating over tropically flavoured drum machines and laidback dub rhythms, eventually succumbing to the tape delay with collapsing echoes. The classic piano stabs of dub reggae on ‘The Transient Purpose Of Echo’ are propelled into far out territories, while ‘Strange Autumn’ drifts between blissfully flowing textures and dancefloor banger rhythms with its stormy, commanding bass. Like the title of ‘Archetypes In Dub’ suggests, it could play out like a quintessential dub jam, were it not for the ethereal flutters of synths and Japanese melodica melodies, with tape effects turning the track into a dreamy slurry.
In an ode to the power of the mixing desk, Taka Noda and Danny Wolfers combine their talents for an enchanting album of digital dub.