Multicast Dynamics Vinyl

He’s just as focussed on musical dynamics; with expansive chords but intimate effects, and how sounds move about in the club as well as in your head. He makes soundscapes rather than tracks, where euphoric moods and thunderous basslines can coexist, and where minute little details capture your mind’s eye while punchy drum work makes an immediate physical impact. He explores the rough and the smooth, the loud and the quiet, the cerebral and the visceral in aquatic and naturalistic worlds where electro, techno, dub and ambient are blurred into one.

This means that as both a producer and comprehensive live act, the Dutchman can take you from the furthest reaches of outer space to the depths of an oceanic abyss via crackling and frozen tundras. He does so under three aliases—VC-118A, Mohlao, Multicast Dynamics, but all are interconnected and related, with a modular approach to making and performing music meaning that a pumping breakbeat live-set can easily be transformed into an abstract sonic landscape by reducing and modifying elements, playing with textures and reworking structures.

“I’m always searching for a duality, something that marries dance floor functionality with an end of the world melodrama that gets deep inside your head,” says the artist. “My process is intuitive and unplanned, so I can start with sound design and atmospherics first, or get lost in rhythms.” This understanding of narrative, as well as groove, means that whatever alias he assumes, he can pump out a peak time festival set, twist you inside out with an intimate session in a cosy club or play an experimental soundscape set in more thought provoking settings with his own avant garde visuals. Dancers at cult places like Tresor, Denovali Festival and a Boiler Room showcase in Nijmegen have all experienced this in the recent past.

Known by electronic music obsessives as one of electro’s shining lights, the last decade has seen van Dijk excel in both EP and LP format. His achingly beautiful melancholic moods and roomy, absorbing grooves are so fully realised that they work well beyond the club context and have come on top labels like Delsin, Frustrated Funk and Silent Season amongst others. They include highlights like the tension between raw machine sounds and ethereal pads that were explored on VC-118A’s underground classic Vaxna; Shift Register, which was made from largely one-take hardware jams with an instinctive and lo-fi finish, and the slow burning techno of Mohlao’s Landforms LP. Of course, his Multicast Dynamics album quadrilogy on Denovali also laid out immersive ambient worlds in truly escapist ways.

The future will bring more multi-layered interplay between these varied but related projects on both solo and collaborative releases. This exploration of opposing forces will continue in the live arena, too, where van Dijk can arrest your attention with thrilling sets of guttural and gritty techno, take you into the future with his electro or zone you out with cathartic ambient. Whatever he does, dance floor experiences are rarely as immersive and emotional as those crafted by this multifaceted artist.