At first Ryan Lee West had taught himself to play the guitar, then only he dealt with digital production and finally studied Music Technology in Leicester. He was the first artist on the London label Erased Tapes in 2007, published a lot of attention since then with different electronic albums with different focuses and gives Live shows in large clubs as Rival Consoles.
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With Landscape from Memory, West is now moving out of its comfort zone, from the studio he built himself in the Hackney district of London – towards emotionally occupied places. The album now holds together all of these sequences as a travel report set in sound. There are distant echoes of techno that fall in synth pop loops, sometimes they are naked melodies that juggle beats on beats, elsewhere in West sound architectures that disclose their connection to the dance floor.
The title track unfolds on an ambient area, then collects all energy and lets it flow into an euphoric synthwave final. “Gaivotas” was born in Lisbon during an artist-in-residence time, a motif on the acoustic guitar in the end decomposes the digital particles. “If not now” refers to classical and homereciting at the same moment, the cello by Anne Müller mixes into the slow synth beat arrangement. Sometimes this sounds like Shoegaze with the means of electronics, the guitar probably plays in the head in “2 Forms” or “Coda”.
This review was first published in the MusikExpress 08/2025.