Crown Hill Repeater is an electronic-music project created by DJ Eric Moon and his pal William Collin Snavely. The group’s latest EP came to fruition after some toying around with modern music software and plugins to manipulate older technology (like a Roland TR-808 drum machine). After-hours club experimentation resulted in the soothing and unsettling soundscapes on The Patient Sessions, Vol. 1.
The album opens with “Blue,” an easily digestible blend of soft swells, unobtrusive beats, and calming synth. It’s easy to drift into a relaxing trance listening to it, even when the track shifts to a heavily reverberating pulse. In a way, “Blue” makes more sense pumping out of a sleep machine—after “spring creek” and “sounds of the rainforest—than on a dance floor. However, the tone quickly shifts to the twitchy bleeps and rhythmic chaos of “Orange.” The otherworldly tune sounds like the soundtrack to a glitch world in Super Mario 64, with the unsettling dark noise a prelude to enemies lurking around the corner. “White” continues this mood as flickers of industrial noise pair with background tones that slowly raise their pitch and the tension. The EP ends with the subtle, eerie stereophonic swirling of “Grey.” The four tracks last just over 20 minutes and showcase a kind of imaginative experimentation that’s in stark relief to traditional club beats.
Review Score: 6.0
*Original version published on SeattleMet.com.*
Long Live the Album 