Beef Terminal

MD Matheson’s instrumental guitar/ambient electronic project inserts its fourth (fifth if you count the early cassette) release into our collective urban subconscious. When 2003’s The Isolationist appeared it marked a watershed of new, warmer colours and textures from a formerly cooler, more machinist approach to ambience. "Anger,” for its part, lives just up the block and around the corner from "The Isolationist,” not a long walk, style-wise. Whether the title is seen as an admonishment to anger itself, or a warning to those in danger from it, the low-key melancholy of the pieces describes sparse, open spaces where the warning has been heeded. The guitar has a hushed echoing underground quality still underpinned by still mostly hard-edged and out-of-time drum machine ticking. The combination of soft/warm and hard/cold sounds generates a mild tension with their disparity. Tracks like "Knife on the Table” and "Free Lemonade” that withdraw the drum track are more liquid and quietly sweeping. These are perfect themes for wandering deserted pre-dawn city streets.