There will be people who rave about this album, and here’s why. LOOP CYCLE is the name that Dan Hickin records under. He plays every instrument and does the vocals, however unlike other types of one man bands, he creates effects and extra depth of sound by using loop pedals. When performing live everything is created and mixed at the gig with the audience watching. Dan builds loops using elements of jazz, rock dance and industrial genres, which has created a genre of its own – ‘Hybrid Fusion’.
So what does this all sound like? The answer is a musically diverse album which allows sound collages to wash over the listener. There are ten tracks on the album, starting with ‘Sooner or Later’. This utilises jazz style guitar and beatbox beats to create a layered and textured track. What vocals there are, are heavily distorted, a mix of scattered sentences (“Sooner or later...You won’t need her"). This basically sets the scene for everything that is to follow.
‘Don’t Look Down’ starts with beats, electric guitars and electronic bleeps before the bass filters in providing a backbone to the track. Once again the lyrics appear to have been fed through a distortion box: “Don’t look down. Oh no, no.”
The third track on this album changes both pace and tack, with electric guitars laying down a wall of heavy fuzz, before going all acoustic and finally reverting back to use of wah wah pedals to create 1970s rock effects. This was really good, and represented a clear shift from everything that had come before.
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Other tracks that represented shifts from the mainstream include ‘Let Her Fade’, an acoustic folk tinged guitar number that’s quite dreamy before merging with electric guitars to create a full on sound. The vocals sound ragged, a repeated “Let her fade” which adds to the ambience.
‘Zoned Out’ has a bass line that is almost pure Bowie’s ‘Queen Bitch’ and bounds along nicely, working alongside a rising guitar line. However it is the six minute long ‘Dream Sequence’ which is the centrepiece of the album. Making a lot of use of electronics, this essentially has three parts, the vocal mantra “You see before the dawn arrives”; followed by a third section of electronic pulses and beats.
Overall, I found this a real change (although in parts an uncomfortable one) from the mainstream, and I think that this would be excellent live as the audience could watch the way in which the loops are created before their very eyes. As an album of mood music, it pulls the listener in and is never dull. That's a recommendation in my book.
Listen to Blueprints at Soundcloud
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