- Since dropping the Disappear EP that I reviewed last year, Brisbane’s White Palms has been busy. After releasing an album's worth of material called Natural Studies he’s back with a double-album’s worth of material, titled Another Time. It marks the inaugural release from While You Where Sleeping, run by the man who is White Palms, Matt Cook, to expose Brisbane’s more experimentally inclined dance and electronic music.

Through the years you may have encountered Cook playing bass for The Rational Academy and contributing to ASSEMBLY. His own material is something entirely different though. Recorded over the span of five years, from 2011-2016, Another Time exhibits numerous musical deviations, while remaining consistent with its hazed-out production. One minute it will be suitable for the club, the next some ghostly loops or bursts of pure rhythm.

The album kicks off with the beautiful shimmering ambience of Prelude. This is mirrored, to a degree, by tracks like the pitch-shifting drift of Over or the stunning arpeggios of Worth (that evoke J.D Emmanuel, Tangerine Dream et al). The album closer Zone can be lumped in with these tracks too, being thoroughly of the Berlin-School and consisting of nine minutes of unfolding modular-synth.

Sometimes the ambience is matched with some heavy kicks, a number of floaty dance tracks thrown in the mix. Eys, for example, starts off with what I presume is a sample while warm chords and bass wash over. Chase, another house-inflected cut, has a similar flavor, with spectral keys and deep bass tones.

What really got me going, is the electro numbers (all of which have the ineffable but necessary quality of “bounce”). Some of these feel like raw, live, modular jams too. Track three, Caussion, jumped out at me, ending as abruptly as it starts. This goes for Marked too. Initial sounds like the Faustian horns you'd hear descending into Dante’s Inferno. Possession starts with some ominous, hazy minor chords while drums, bass and bleeps come in and out. This track and the 808-menace invoked by Here They Say reminded me of the far-out experiments of Drexciya or Underground Resistance. Detroit atmospheres are explored in another favourite of mine: Level Flight, although it sounds more akin to some minimal synth reissue on Dark Entries or Mannequin.

Across the breadth of Another Time’s twenty-four tracks, White Palms takes you through various moods, from the dubbed out to the blissful to the menacing. All the tracks are tied together through their propulsion and production though and -for all that space and scope- it's pretty easy to sum up: for anyone who likes noisy, fucked-up dance music this will be right up your alley.

- Hill Folk.