Strategy

Portlander Paul Dickow, as Strategy, presents his latest album— A Cooler World. Fascinated by the unfamiliar limitations and inherent playability of a hand-me-down, 1989 model sampling keyboard, he played these pieces by hand, mostly abandoning the sequencer driven framework of sampling based music; he plays the sampler here the way a guitarist approaches the guitar. A Cooler World is a deep dive into glacial, pensive soundscapes that navigate the boundaries between experimental, ambient, and dance music.

The pieces unfold with deliberate intention, expressed in a sound vocabulary that originates in the futurism of ambient techno, yet they open to the serendipitous outcomes of his instrumental experimentation. One of his few albums that fully commits to ambience, with this new album, everything is slowed down, gesturing towards stillness, and transformed into something otherworldly under a blanket of snow.