Bvdub
A Different Definition Of Love

Brock Van Wey is undoubtedly a very interesting and peculiar figure who deserves to be rediscovered or at least given more consideration, if only for his hyper-productivity, which since the late nineties has led him to publish as many as 30 LPs. The thirtieth, indeed, is this LP released on Dronarivm, a small happy island, so to speak, in the city of Moscow, born with a targeted focus on publishing in the field of contemporary and avant-garde music, both in the ambient genre and classical and neo-classical music.

In the end, Brock has a very unique story and is an eclectic musician. He emerged in San Francisco's rave scene in the late eighties when this, combined with genres like deep-house and ambient, represented a total novelty in the music world and what would later become a form of counter-culture in Europe and especially in the United Kingdom. Then he drops everything and disappears for ten years in a kind of exile in China. Upon his return, he devotes himself to ambient compositions with a much more "deep" style than his early days, leading him to create a magnificent work like this "A Different Definition Of Love" (subtitle "Forget") published under the name bvdub and composed of six long tracks of electronic ambient music with a strong evocative and emotional component and a vast range of sounds that somehow seeks depth, while the passage of time is dictated by repeated loops. If you close your eyes and concentrate, you realize they recede entirely into the background compared to those synthetic sound extensions, which all seem to flow in a specific direction but appear without a defined destination, like watching a rushing torrent or a river born from the mountain's belly. Perhaps you can see the beginning or maybe perceive just a "piece." But the end? Even if you know it exists, because it's inevitable, at that moment you don't see it, and you can't see it.

Without seeking comparisons that would be awkward for anyone, I would mention Brian Eno's experimental electronics as one of bvdub's main reference points. I'm referring to the type of sounds and explorations that may be only apparently undynamic. This is a record that, after all, does not exactly move according to two dimensions and is not even an object with three-dimensional connotations. Rather than filling the spaces, it expands them, or better yet, refers them to a second dimension, which is where the mentioned outward movement perhaps finds its rationale and its natural conclusion. Everything in between, before, you can listen to in the record, and maybe this, besides being a different definition of what love is, is also the description of its truest and most authentic nature that must be sought in that kind of momentum of the moment and, before it's too late, let oneself be consciously carried away by this current.