My friend and fellow music writer, Racer, forwarded an email from Nick Cooke who records under the name cuttooth. Nick had submitted his new album, Elements, for review by The Ripple Effect and Racer knows me well enough to sense that I’d click with this release and as usual he was right. I tend to like trippy, spacey music and ambient hip hop and Elements hits on all of these styles.
Elements opens with "Intro", a spacey little appetizer reminiscent of Boards of Canada featuring a single spoken line slowed down to eerie effect. The second track, "In A Dream", opens with a bright and echoing guitar chord ringing out as a downtempo beat slowly fades up underneath. Not that it was necessary, as the track is dreamy enough, but a voice chanting “in a dream” repeats in the background. This creates a nice bit of tension in the piece.
cuttooth makes excellent use of ambient sounds, spoken word samples and layers of disconnected sounds to weave a dreamscape. Rather than bore you, dear reader, with a track-by-track analysis I will attempt to describe the album as a singular piece of work:
Are you a fan of lucid dreams? Are you apt to daydream? Do you go off into a reverie when your senses are hit with a certain sound, smell or visual that suggests something beyond our limited physical surroundings?
If you fit the above profile, I’d highly recommend giving this a listen. This is an album for the dreamers among us. This is headphone music. For me, that’s the highest compliment I could pay Mr. Cooke.
--Jones
Cuttooth - Elements [Psychonavigation Records] PSY045 Samples by psychonavigation