With Dor Mit Oru, Rhadoo follows through on that promise, throwing the doors wide open with the sly fury of a benevolent Pandora.
The double EP is nothing if not ambitious, featuring four long, evolving tracks that forego gimmicks in favor of a deeper kind of engagement. What upon first listen sounds minimal, thanks to a familiar palette of treated percussion, slight harmonic squiggles, and not much else, reveals itself to be far denser, deeper, and more nuanced. Unusually hypnotic, Rhadoo’s tracks blindfold the listener, spinning you round like a dervish, until dizziness dissolves into pure weightlessness.
What makes Rhadoo’s grooves so different? It’s impossible to put your finger on, but it has something to do with his curious sense of timekeeping. His beats flex with the twitchy fallibility of human muscles. His melodic phrases stretch far beyond the familiar confines of the four-bar loop, unfurling to fill space in a way seemingly without measure. Insistent, almost tribal patterns are atomized into boundless orbits.
It also has something to do with Rhadoo’s approach to sound, fusing the reassuring warmth of acoustic percussion with the shimmering timbres of the digital imagination, as though threading catgut and horsehair with pixel pearls.
For all its underlying complexity, Rhadoo’s music is unusually immediate: these are songs for the dance, after all, as welcoming as a familiar face behind the decks. Welcome to Rhadoo’s world.