Artist: Shlomi Aber
Title: State Of No One
Label: Renaissance Recordings
By: Carleton Neil | 5 December 2007
Tracklist:

1. Looking In God's Eyes
2. Eastern Breeze
3. State Of No One
4. Never Cried
5. My BAO Dreams
6. Don't Be A Fool (Feat Guy Mantzur)
7. The Thing That Nobody Knows
8. Moods (Feat Lemon) (Album Version)
9. The Paradise Garage
10. Random Fiction (Feat Ben Hemo)
11. Sea Of Sand (With Guy Gerber) (Album Edit)
12. Same But Different (Feat Itamar Sagi & 3KO)

Shlomi Aber "State Of No One"

Aficionados of electronic music all get involved in the field in one form or another. Some are content to simply listen and experience. Others like to play it out, or get in the studio and contribute to the field. Still others are there to shape it, move it and deliver it to us in a neat little package.

Shlomi Aber has taken all of these tasks upon himself like a one-man band. He plays all the parts: picking up influences from Detroit techno to Jazz, what started as playing garage parties with support from his friends as a teenager has turned into worldwide support for his studio efforts that are supported by some you just might know - John Digweed, Richie Hawtin, Carl Craig, to get you started. Toss in his newly formed label Be As No One Recordings and a DJ schedule chock-full of tour dates, and he's still got time to put out his first artist album on Renaissance, 'Be As No One' and make it home in time for supper. His LP carries his glitchy minimalism and is equally melodic, organic, and emotive, but toned down from his usual releases constructed for the club.

While the beginning of the album and 'Looking Into God's Eyes' twists and struggles like the hatching of a robotic reptile, 'Eastern Breeze' wobbles like unsteady legs around some xylophonic percussion and features an old man Shlomi transported six hours to record his playing of the oud, a guitar-like instrument with the neck bent back at a ninety degree angle. The dizzy title track stumbles with blurry eyes and a slurred vocal like a trip to the corner store with a Sunday morning hangover, and 'Never Cried' mimics a plucked string with a wary synth like an overprotective mother reining in an exuberant child. 'My BAO Dreams' is signature Shlomi, a track that bleeps and blips like a roundtable of aliens, and the stand-out track on the album has to be 'The Thing That Nobody Knows'; beautiful but sad, a chilling, almost depressingly somber lick that wails with sobbing ambiance.

Keeping emotions in check, 'Moods', Shlomi's collaboration with Lemon offers a new direction and turns to soft upbeat kicks and an isolated innocence, the track plinking like a quiet day of skipping rocks on water. Another welcome surprise is 'The Paradise Garage', an acoustic vignette of a recorded drum kit with a plodding, head-bobbing bassline and a touch of the dusty clicks and bumps of an old vinyl. 'Sea of Sand' feels like it was added to show off Aber's more club-oriented style, though it is still more melodic than his latest, 'Diosa' and 'Sekur'. The two real vocal tracks on the album are wonderfully produced, but both are quite the head nod to Trentemoller. 'Don't Be A Fool' plays out very similar to the vocal version of 'Always Something Better', and 'Random Fiction' croons like Trentemoller's own remix of 'Moan'. Thankfully the last track ends the album on a contented note that is both docile and resolute, a warm conclusion after some of the earlier tracks in the album that pull emotionally.

One can easily put 'State Of No One' on his or her top 5 albums of 2007. Classy but quiet, there's a place for this album in a lounge or when you're on your own. Considering the label he's on and the ways he contributes to electronic music, it's quite fitting to call Shlomi Aber a Renaissance man.