Pyramidal – Come Home
5.4.17 by Ryan Durfee

I have spent a week or two listening to “Come Home” three or four times a day, but I still feel as if I don’t have the right words to praise it. I’ve thrown about comparisons to Bonobo and Boards of Canada, and while they do seem apt, it’s only because of Pyramidal‘s penchant to draw from the deep wellspring of late 2000’s downbeat electronica. Still, that doesn’t go far enough for what may be my favorite tape from the always on point Already Dead. There are also definite nods to hip hop (I wanna say trip hop, but is that even okay in 2k17?), warm, lush, and rounded synths, snaps that are perfectly dusty, and bass that hits just right.

This cassette was released back in November of 2016, but came to me in February, just in time for the constant deluge of rain that Cascadia is famous for. The weather provided plenty of time to sit around my apartment taking it’s sounds in, windows open, a soft patter outside, while smoking a pre roll. As a matter of fact, that may be the best time to list to this tape. “Come Home” is an album to be heard to from front-to-back, as each song propels the next forward. The album starts out on a park bench, with a field recording of a siren wailing and feet crunching on pavement. Voices chatter in the background, giving way to dark, drafty chords swathed in reverb. The second song, Life And Upbringing with it’s lovely sampled harp, lends the feeling of sitting in a brightly lit corner of a room with sun shining and dust motes floating around while Love Should Be Easy, is full of beautiful night tones; Walking under streetlights, enshrouded in a dark sky’s drizzle. My Old Cassette, the most straight forward nod to late 2000’s hip hop, doesn’t sound out of place against those tunes or older Brainfeeder releases. “Come Home” covers much ground, rounding things out with sumptuous synth swells (and what I -think- is marimba?).

This C46 is fantastic and available in an edition of 60 copies from Already Dead.