Daniel Avery Ultra Truth Review: Ambient Techno Steeped in Nostalgia

The DJ and producer looks back on his own musical past, taking inspiration from the artists that shaped his youth.

Daniel Avery, Ultra Truth
Photo: Steve Gullick

Daniel Avery has continuously modified his take on techno by infusing it with traces of shoegaze and dream pop, as well as nods to the sounds of the genre’s Detroit origins. On Ultra Truth, however, the DJ and producer looks back on his own musical past, taking inspiration from the artists that shaped his youth—Deftones, Portishead, Mogwai, the rave scene, and film directors like David Lynch—to craft the most personal entry in his genre-defying oeuvre to date.

The album kicks off with the lush “New Faith,” a pensive, piano-driven number that recalls the more somber moments from Boards of Canada releases like Tomorrow’s Harvest. The track’s keyboards become increasingly drowned out by hazy white noise, eventually fading into silence, making room for a spoken-word outro that segues into the gorgeous title track, where yearning synth lines are backed by cavernous beats and rumbling bass.

On the moody “Wall of Sleep,” whose searing melancholy harkens back to the video game soundtracks of the 16-bit era, booming drums are juxtaposed with simmering synths and a delicate vocal sample courtesy of fellow DJ and producer HAAi. In Avery’s own words, the song more or less defines the album’s aesthetic, building from glittery ambient drones to haunting, ethereal EDM. Similarly, the mysterious “Spider” showcases his knack for conjuring more subdued atmospherics, its chilly vibe enhanced by a serene arpeggio.

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While Ultra Truth is marked by nostalgia, Avery largely avoids the typical pitfalls of mining the past for inspiration, as he deftly oscillates between gauzy abstraction and straightforward danceability. When he blends both sensibilities, as on the downbeat “Collapsing Sky” and the amphibious “Lone Swordsman,” the results are sublime, but his excursions into dance floor-ready club music or painterly ambient tracks prove less successful. “Devotion” features a stuttering drum ‘n’ bass pattern that stumbles over a wash of synthesizers, uneventfully fizzling out after about four minutes; the same drum pattern returns, pretty much unaltered, a few tracks later on “Higher,” its effectiveness sapped further by the nagging feeling of déjà entendu.

The strange magnetism of tracks like “The Slow Bullet” is undercut by Avery essentially repeating the same idea numerous times throughout the album, namely on “Only” and “Overflowing with Escape.” Even so, there’s a heterogenous undercurrent permeating Ultra Truth that finds its purest expression in the penultimate track, “Chaos Energy.” Featuring collaborators Kelly Lee Owens and HAAi, the song starts off with mellow electronica, increasing in intensity before a drum break announces an eruption into a sinister rave jam, complete with wobbling bass and rousing synth chords.

Ultra Truth feels most alive in these moments and, overall, it hits the mark more often than it misses. While the almost hour-long album does suffer the occasional lull, at his best Avery effortlessly pushes the sounds that influenced him into new territory.

Score: 
 Label: Mute  Release Date: November 4, 2022  Buy: Amazon

Fred Barrett

Fred Barrett is a film and music writer with a love for noise rock and arthouse cinema. His writing has also appeared in In Review Online and The Big Ship.

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