Edges

Graze are two male human beings from Toronto who make electronic music. After the tides of fate pulled them together from their respective corners of electronic producerdom, Adam Marshall and Christian Andersen have produced this, their debut album, Edges.

It is a thing of beauty, but a difficult one at that, like an industrial estate, or a Lowry painting, or a particularly rare boiler to a boiler enthusiast. It has a distant kind of charm that you have to work to benefit from, and can often feel pointy at the corners.

The LP opens with ‘Skip/Crush’, a former single released by fellow ideas men New Kanada (but not, as you might assume, fellow countrymen - they’re from Berlin). It’s not exactly concise, but then all of these tracks take their time to get where they’re going. Much like ‘Ripley’, it rolls in and out of focus.

It can sometimes be difficult to talk about electronic music without getting overly technical. For that reason, analysis from anyone other than a sound technician or equivalent tends to be spelt out in abstract terms. This seems a serviceable justification for what is to follow. Some tracks on this album, for example ‘Stack Array’, sound like applause in a swimming pool, whereas others, like ‘Oath’, sound more like rows of satellite dishes seen from a distance. This is not deliberate obfuscation; it’s the only language that makes any sense.

There’s a school of thought that would paint this sort of music as clinical. There’s evidence of numbers and science through the whole thing, but there’s also a huge amount of the real on Edges. ‘Cold Drop’, the most dancefloor-friendly track is just that, but it is executed with sensitivity as opposed to cynicism.

It seems there’s a considerable overlap in the Venn diagram of ‘things that are complicated’ and ‘things that are marvelous when you’re fantastically drunk’. With Edges, Graze have set up camp in that field and invited everyone round to enjoy the occupation.