about the cassette

Portlander Paul Dickow’s 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 opens to the serendipitous outcomes of his instrumental experimentation.

Fascinated by the unfamiliar limitations and inherent playability of a hand-me-down 1989-model sampling keyboard, he played the 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.

One of his few albums that fully commits to ambience, A Cooler World slows everything down, gestures toward stillness, and transforms into something otherworldly under a blanket of snow.