It’s not that it is a intrinsically bad album, mind you… It’s just that it sounds more like beginner’s music than an achieved work. I fail to hear more than distant signs of the artist’s own, personal voice.

Apparently, the man behind Pola is a young Japanese sound artist who has been making since early 2000. At first, he was producing tracks reminiscent of early 90’s techno, before moving to the supposedly more interesting pastures of experimental electronic music.

And we do get a mix of both sounds… Contrary to many artists of today, Pola favours the MPC2000 and analogue sounds to the laptop. In itself, this could be the mark of a certain particularity. The listener is entertained by means of those typical cold and melodic sounds that made the reputation of early techno as well as your typical glitches, clicks and cuts, and various other weird sounds so typical since the rise of artists such as Fennesz and Oval (Pola’s heroes).

Unfortunately, typical + typical + typical amounts to not much. Truth be told, there are some nice moments, nice melodies and all, but the nice bits are often let down by the lack of dynamic in the tracks itself.

It’s not like it’s awful or something, it’s just that it doesn’t really stand in good light when you compare it to the usual high standard of Plop. The cover art remains as beautiful as ever though.