Album Review: Pitch Black - Filtered Senses (2016)

Here's my review of Pitch Black's Filtered Senses for NZ Musician magazine. I also interviewed Paddy Free for the mag and will link to that at a later date. What a great album this is ...

Filtered Senses is studio album number five for the pioneering flag bearers of Aotearoa’s rapidly evolving electronica scene, Pitch Black. It’s the duo’s first full-length release for nine years, made primarily by sending sound files back and forth across the globe while its protagonists got on with life in different parts of the world. Eventually Mike Hodgson (London) and Paddy Free (Piha, New York) got together to add the spit and polish final touches at Hodgson’s home studio, with the requisite trademark attention to detail which ensures the end product doesn’t disappoint. More than that, it works as a timely reminder of just how much Hodgson and Free still have to offer, and just how cutting edge the pair’s work has been across two full decades of working together. If anything, Filtered Senses takes things to a different level; while Pitch Black’s signature dubby dancefloor textures remain firmly intact, this feels somewhat darker and denser than anything they’ve done in the past. There’s a claustrophobic, paranoid, almost post-apocalyptic energy buried somewhere deep in this mix, and the 8-track album is all the better for the way it rather perfectly represents the worrying state of our planet as we approach the end of 2016. Looking forward to the remix version already – if we make it far, that is.

http://nzmusician.co.nz/music/pitch-black-filtered-senses/