Andrew Duke

This is a wet album. Watery noises that sound like running rivers and dripping water are heavily processed, looped and filtered in this album of ambient soundscapes. Imagine a rainy day run through a food processor and an echo chamber. You can’t use water to make melodies, so Duke uses it to fashion set pieces with different moods and textures. The album is mostly beatless — changes in the source sounds define the tracks, a little like Christian Fennesz’s fuzzed-out recordings. Vocal snippets appear occasionally but are often muffled or hidden. Duke gets a wide variety of sounds onto this album, like the gentle whirs of "Paradise Paving,” the dripping Chinese water torture of "Insidious” and the complicated blips of "Stone Skips 7 Times.” Overall, it’s a surprisingly soothing album, given the complete lack of organic sounds.