New York experimental producer Patrick Grant is best known for his fantastic guitar skills and his interesting composition, but by all accounts electronica usually takes a back burner in most of his work. By any and all EDM fan accounts, said electronica doesn’t even come close to actual EDM but stays firmly planted on the experimental side of things. Such is generally the case with Grant’s sophomore album, A Sequence of Waves, with one glaring exception: track nine, “Lonely Ride Coney Island.” Here, Grant ventures out from his usual Dadaist classical/guitar structure and goes right past ambient electronica into legitimate EDM territory.
“Lonely Ride Coney Island” doesn’t give the impression at first that it will be anything other than ambient electronic music as it opens, with not much of beat and, surprisingly, none of Grant’s ubiquitous guitars. The track is indeed more along the lines of a spacey, modernized version of a Tangerine Dream song for nearly the first half of the track. Then it is surprisingly the introduction of a quit clearly analog drumset and finally the guitars which push this track into EDM territory. Why? Quite simply the setup and the beat which follows. As the track moves into the guitar and drum portion, there is an actual drum break and buildup into this section. The spacey, ambient vibe continues and that definitely adds to it but now because of the drums, which straddle house and old school breakbeat we suddenly have a danceable electronic track: EDM.
It’s unclear whether Patrick Grant intended to move the ambient, spacey work that is “Lonely Ride Coney Island” into EDM territory, but that’s what he effectively had. Listening to the track it’s almost like listening to the birth of EDM out of the miasma of ambient electronica. It’s an interesting study in what pushes electronic music into electronic dance music.
A Sequence of Waves is out now and available to stream on Soundcloud or stream and purchase on Bandcamp
