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Music journalist and musicologist who specialized in and taught the aesthetics of electronic music at the University of Copenhagen, Rasmus Riegels recommends three singles from Erosion Flow:

“While Copenhagen has deservedly gotten some attention, in the last 5 years or so, for its fast-paced techno laced with melodies that are part The Cure and part trance, it might also be time to revision this sound… at least just to pinpoint, where some of its blind spots are. When we can’t experience the thrill of the fast rumbling beats blasted out of a stack of speakers due to the COVID-lockdown of the clubs, now is a great time to investigate, what happens when you lower the beats per minute. This is where Erosion Flow (a.k.a. Henrik Koefod) comes in. Having earlier released more traditional club-based house and techno tracks with a stint of British bass music, he has over the last couple of months put out three singles that explores syncopation and texture in a way that a traditional “tool-track” might not. 

Groovy

All three singles float on a bed of prolonged sub-bass tones, with a tempo looking below 120 bpm, which makes it very suitable for home listening. Exploring this pace doesn’t make the tracks less physical, but rather than achieving physicality through the sheer speed and brute force of 4-to-the-floor kicks, the tracks get their physical aspect by hyper-syncopating their percussive elements, so they work together to enforce the actual beats of the song – basically they are groovy!

Grind off a few BMPs

One of the strongest aspects of the Fast Forward scene in Copenhagen is its romantic nostalgia – sometimes described as blue euphoria – which it gets from its beautiful melodies. Erosion Flow’s tracks affect me in the same way, but they don’t do it as much through their use of melodies (though there are great melodies on the singles), as they do it through eroding sound textures. The singles explore a certain digital aesthetic by sampling and crunching their sounds, which produces a sonic equivalent to looking at an aged photograph of your childhood or hearing the warped sound of an old cassette tape. But it is only an affect! This doesn’t sound like it could be from the early 90s – it sounds like the exploration of a blue mood in a digitalized era. It is my hope that this could point towards new ways that the scene of Copenhagen could expand its sound – even if it had to grind off a few BPMs”.

Do you agree?

Listen to the three singles below:

Erosion Flow – Hardwater

Erosion Flow – Enhance

Erosion Flow – Tilt Shift