From the Toolkit of Lovers: It’s a great dirty joke. On his second album as Loidis, Brian Leeds presents himself as a colossal figure straddling the club and home-listening universes, never losing sight of these 12 sprawling tracks’ function as DJ tools while letting romance poke through with lush pads and addictive chord-snaps. His weight shifts just slightly in the direction of the club, perhaps owing to the aversion to ambient music he’s shown in recent interviews; nothing feels like it’s there just to be pretty, and the palette is stark black and white with occasional flashes of primary colors. But if this isn’t quite the album to nudge the minimal revival back towards the “land of goosebumps and sex” that Leeds’ hero Vladislav Delay opened up on his 2000 epic Vocalcity, it’s at least a milestone in the revival’s ongoing development.
Leeds came to fame in his very early twenties as Huerco S., releasing a string of misty ambient house records that paired frayed KDJ-ish mystique with startling sound design. On “Anagramme of My Love,” from his gobstopping 2013 debut, Colonial Patterns, he conjured an impossibly deep techno beat seemingly just from the snapping of twigs, the crunching of leaves, the movement of air. That knack for making music that sounds more like an irruption in the environment than an assemblage of instruments carries across the six sides of vinyl that comprise From the Toolkit of Lovers. The editorial grace implied in the term “clicks + cuts,” often used to describe this style of electronic music, is evident here. This stuff must sound incredible in the club, like it’s slicing the air.
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For most of the record’s nearly two-hour runtime, Leeds draws from a disciplined selection of sounds, most of them sourced from post-Maurizio developments in minimal techno. Percussion is at the forefront of the mix, with microscopic pinpricks in lieu of hi-hats and lots of keylike metallic jangling run through sheets of echo. A throbbing kick drum, so precisely programmed it’s almost beyond notice, serves as the engine guiding the listener through this horizontal landscape. Snare drums are optional; “Possession Centre” generates tremendous tension through its lack of one, as if it’s continuously starting and restarting. Rosy synth pads peek out from under everything, but Leeds keeps a tight rein on them and never allows them to spill over into schmaltz.
