Koiwa / Nicolás Aimo - Dikarya (梅レコード / Umé Records) [Ambient / Electronic]

The Slow Music Movement
6 days ago
2 min read

The cover for Koiwa and Nicolás Aimo's Dikarya album, showing abstract green shapes on white background. Text: Koiwa & Nicolás Aimo, Dikarya. The word "Ambient" is split at the top.

Koiwa is best known as Cristián Laborde, an Argentinian producer and multi-instrumentalist born in Buenos Aires, who has been floating around the electronic music world, producing everything from house and techno all the way down to after the after party ambient sedatives, and everything in between. Nicolás Aimo is a similarly storied producer who's been on the Argentinian electronic music scene for a few years longer, with an equally eclectic electronic vision, so it's quite the meeting of machine mindedness.

I actually missed Dikarya when it was released last year on the ever interesting 梅レコード/Umé Records, but I'm glad I finally caught up with it. Like all good albums the transmission from our men in Buenos Arie starts off unhurriedly with the gently twinkling synthlights and almost becalmed ambient drift of "Matsudo", five minutes of sonic serenity which should be every respectable sleep playlists.

It doesn't take long for the album to start morphing into hazier machine territory though. Next up is "SNP" which somehow frees itself of gravitational pull to float up past the earth's atmosphere and say hello to the Kármán Line where it sparkles in the night sky whilst pleasingly distorting due to the pressures of flirting with space's border. Further sonic decay creeps in on the ambient infrastructure of "Kvitøya", so the lads introduce some languorous trip hop drums to hold the fraying synths together producing a wonderfully woozy slice of downtempo.

Sounding like an android, "T5" paints a bright ambient future as it floats and quivers through the speakers, hanging in the air of the listening room like cigarette smoke in a windowless room. "Ayolas" hides its drums in a neighbouring studio, the faint percussion barely breaking through the melancholic ambient distress, which paves the way nicely for "Sankalpa" to say goodbye in slowly building, maximal ambient fashion. It's a fine ethereal transmission from the tip of South America, a place not widely known for its ambient output and if sofa positioned stargazing is your thing then you should tune in.