By Sean Huncherick

Electronic music is one of my least favorite types of music to review. It’s not that I don’t like it; I listen to it relatively often and have enjoyed artists ranging from John Cage and Stockhausen to Merzbow and Dan Deacon for the past few years. I love how experimental, relaxing, chaotic or danceable house, trance, trip-hop, etc. can be. The problem I run into when trying to evaluate an electronic album is that people tend to listen it them differently than they would listen to most genres of pop, rock, and rap. This is especially true when you have an ambient house album like Water.

Water comes from a house artist named Anton Zap, a producer and DJ from Moscow, Russia. For the five of you that are already familiar with his music, be warned that this album only features three unreleased songs. The other five have been on various albums and compilations over the last five years. For most people, the lack of new material shouldn’t be a problem.

Water is a solid ambient album from the start, but it took me a bit longer to notice anything too special. It wasn’t until the second or third listen that Anton Zap started to win me over. I even found myself nodding my head like some white boy caught in a trance during “Captain Storm,” which smoothly transitions to “Miles and More.” The first of the two is hot and could easily be played at the not-super-lame clubs and the latter is a bit more experimental (it also features a clip of an airplane pilot’s message. Cool, right?).

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/88990308″ params=”” width=” 100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

“Funky Man” sticks out because it’s perhaps the most danceable and “normal” song on the album. Expect big synth beats, synthesizers and a drum machine. It’s still experimental, but it’s more straightforward than the others. It’s also clearly a bit funky, which is probably why it was cleverly named “Funky Man”.

Overall, the album is pretty relaxing and fun, but not terribly amazing. I could easily see playing it while writing something or using it as background music you can shake to, but not much else. Perhaps the most fun I had with the album is adding layers to it. One time when I was listening to “Miles and More,” and about halfway through the song, I started to hear something interesting. It turns out that I had another copy of the same song playing on a website at the same time. When I closed out of the website, it was hard to go back to hearing the song normally. With electronic music, the music is just as much in the mixing and experimenting as it is in the final version. So if you download the album, get it in two different files and play with it. Try mixing up different songs.

Score: 3/5

Anton Zap: iTunes