MH-240 Pedro - Pedro [2006 Edition] Originally released in Europe on Manchester's Melodic Records, Pedro's self-titled full-length debut has garnered universal critical praise, including nods from a number of his production peers. The album is the sound of an artist finding his voice through the distillation of disparate musical forms. Textures of jazz, folk, and rock sit upon a bed of hip-hop infused beats supplemented with samples chopped and layered as musical instruments. The compositions range from simple piano embellished with rhythm generating effects to complex collages filled with live synths swirling over layers of heavy drum programming. The CD version of the album contains the EP, Fear & Resilience (which features remixes by Danger Mouse, Four Tet, Prefuse 73, and others) as a bonus CD.

Tracklist 01. Intro 02. Fear & Resilience 03. Dead Grass 04. These Pixels Weave A Person 05. The Water Ran This Way Back And Forth 06. 123 07. All Things Rendered 08. Seven Eight 09. Outro

Release Details Release Date: 02/14/2006   Running Time: 38:44   Download/Available/$7.00 1XLP/Available/$10.00 2XCD/Available/$10.00 Territory: World

Reviews Summary

A knob-twiddler extrordinaire - Under The Radar / Wonderful stuff - NME / A resplendent sound collage - Remix / There will be few better soundtracks to this summer - Stylus / This is IDM that never loses the listener in its tangents. - BPM / A genre-confounding tale of the unexpected from the deftest of techno artisans - Mojo

Reviews

944 / Almost Cool / Angry Ape / Barcode / BBC / Boomkat / BPM / CMJ / DJ / Dotshop / Download / Earplug / Gravity Girl / Igloo / Illinois Entertainer / Logo / Loose Record / Mojo / NME / Okayplayer / Properly Chilled / Remix / San Francisco Bay Guardian / Signal to Noise / Slug / Sonomu / Stylus / Tastes Like Chicken / Textura / The Big Picture / The Brainwashed Brain / The Independent / The Maneater / The Pitt News / Tiny Mix Tapes / Treblezine / Uncut / Under the Radar / Urb / X-Ray / XLR8R / XLR8R /

Originally released on Melodic Records in 2003, Pedro's self-titled debut should be familiar territory. Rising star James Rutledge ensconced himself securely into the cadre of glitch-hoppers that includes Prefuse 73 and Four Tet, though Pedro always felt muted next to the former's bravado and the latter's maniacal grandiosity. Likewise, the album's Stateside release three years later doesn't really push boundaries, but does remind us that Rutledge's surgical beats and fractured pastoral melodies can hold their own. But the real gem is the accompanying Fear and Resilience EP, featuring remixes of the LP's best-known track by Prefuse 73, Cherrystones, Danger Mouse, and others. Home Skillet and Four Tet offer particularly amazing stuff: one dismantles the original into thousands of grandfather clocks chiming psychotically down a rabbit hole; the other pushes further with a 21-minute build that releases fragments of Pedro's strings and horns into a free-jazz masterpiece. - XLR8R