British producer
Fort Romeau is responsible for a highly consistent run of singles, which have ranged from finely tuned acid house to ecstasy-spiked rave techno.
Beings of Light is his third full-length, and it stays true to his eclectic spirit while letting him branch out a bit and explore more textural, ambient directions he might not venture down with his club-focused singles. "Untitled IV" opens the album with stuttering, trance-like arpeggios that constantly seem on the verge of a sort of breakthrough. Instead, the track surprisingly fades into a bed of strings, horns, and rainfall. The next few selections are lush, acutely detailed tracks that bask in the dreaminess of deep house but feature the type of meticulous, constantly swimming sound design that simply wasn't possible when the genre was created in the 1980s. "The Truth" is filled with skipping, scraping sounds reminiscent of the laptop-spawned microhouse subgenre of the 2000s, but with a vast canopy of ambient synths and a warm bassline. "Power of Grace" is a swirling dub-tech track that incorporates samples from one of the most memorable scenes in Paris Is Burning, the classic 1990 documentary about New York ball culture. "Spotlights" opens with a shower of squirming synths and feedback before locking into a steady beat, and slowly accumulating a rush of scattered sounds and voices, as well as a layer of cloud-like synth pads. "Ramona" is a more stripped-down techno track with a haunting, stretched-out voice murmuring through it, until layers of wispy, stirring synths seep their way in towards the end. The closing title track seems to go further down this dream portal, setting lustrous synth swells to a patiently ticking beat before letting them fly off into the ether.
Fort Romeau still clearly makes dance music -- one of the album's tracks was specifically crafted with German club Robert Johnson in mind -- but
Beings of Light finds the producer searching beyond the scope of his previous output in order to evoke different emotions. ~ Paul Simpson
