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Frivolous

Wasting Time

The closing track of Meteorology, the 2011 album the Vancouver producer Daniel Gardner made as Frivolous for Luciano's Cadenza label after a breakup on a Pacific island: sample-padded tech house whose title Textura called a risky move under the circumstances.

By korczis 2 min read
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Review

Genre and Mood

Frivolous is Daniel Gardner, a producer from Canada’s west coast, and Wasting Time closes his 2011 album Meteorology. Resident Advisor heard the album as vaguely tropical and twitchy tech house, and Exclaim heard microhouse sampling techniques. The feelings on this page, playful and bittersweet, are our reading of an album that critics heard as cheerful on the surface and troubled underneath.

Song Summary

Wasting Time is the eleventh and last track of Meteorology, released by Luciano’s label Cadenza in February 2011, and it runs a little over five minutes. The album has a backstory that Resident Advisor and Textura both told: Gardner found Berlin unwelcoming, moved to a small cabin on a mountaintop on an island in the Pacific, and his partner ended their relationship just before she was due to join him. Textura found that under the circumstances, calling a track Wasting Time was a risky move.

Musical Breakdown

No source describes Wasting Time part by part, and the one review that names it does not say how it sounds, so this breakdown stays with what the reviews say about the album around it.

Intro

Listen for how the closer sets up its groove, and whether it starts from the samples or from the beat.

Main Section

Across the album, Resident Advisor heard beats padded with an entire ecosystem of samples, and a lot of Gardner’s own dry, detached baritone; whether he sings on this track, the sources do not say.

Outro

Listen for how an album that critics found as uplifting as it was unsettling takes its leave.

Concepts in Focus

sampling is the method behind Meteorology. Exclaim heard microhouse sampling techniques building subtle grooves, somewhere between the dub of early Deadbeat records and the techno funk of the Montreal producer Mossa. In microhouse, small recorded sounds, cut short and repeated, take the place a synthesizer riff would take elsewhere.

The groove is what Textura praised even while it found the album underwhelming: Gardner’s grooves were deliciously tight throughout. Exclaim heard a record that builds nicely at an amiable mid-tempo pace without ever going for the jugular.

Artistic Context

Gardner left British Columbia for Montreal in the early 2000s, when the city was a techno hotbed, and moved on to Berlin with many of the same Canadian producers. Meteorology was his third album in seven years, after Midnight Black Indulgence on ~scape in 2007, and his first for Cadenza. Compare another Vancouver act abroad, Bob Moses – Tearing Me Up.

Impact and Reception

The verdicts were mixed. Resident Advisor found the album fascinating, honest and sometimes too eager to be different; Textura, which liked the grooves, wrote that the closer is not mandatory listening. Decide for yourself whether five minutes of Wasting Time are time wasted.

Learn from this track

Intermediate

What you will learn

  • Describe the microhouse approach Exclaim heard on Meteorology: grooves built from samples rather than from big synth parts.
  • Explain how an album's backstory can change the way a listener hears a track's title.
  • Weigh a critic's negative verdict against your own listening of the same track.

Listening guide

  1. the samples The ecosystem of intriguing samples Resident Advisor heard padding the beats across the album; listen for which ones this closing track keeps.
  2. the groove What Textura called deliciously tight grooves throughout the album, at the amiable mid-tempo pace Exclaim described.
  3. the ending The last five minutes of an album Resident Advisor called as uplifting as it can be depressing; no source describes how this closer ends.

Concepts in this track

sampling

63 tracks

Taking a fragment of an existing recording and reusing it in a new one, as a loop, a chop or a texture. Sampling is central to hip-hop and dance music and raises questions of credit and copyright.

groove

63 tracks

The felt quality of a rhythm that makes people move: how drums, bass and the other parts lock together and push against each other in time.

Listen next, and why

Questions for discussion

  1. Textura called the title a risky move, given the breakup behind the album. Does knowing the backstory change how you hear Wasting Time?
  2. Textura found the closer not mandatory listening. What would make an album's last track essential?
  3. Resident Advisor heard a cheery surface that sometimes crumbles. Can a dance track be playful and sad at once?

References

  1. Resident Advisor. Frivolous - Meteorology (2011). Review
  2. Textura. Frivolous: Meteorology (2011). Review
  3. Exclaim!. Frivolous: Meteorology (2011). Review
  4. MusicBrainz. Wasting Time (recording). Database
  5. YouTube (Frivolous - Topic). Wasting Time. Video

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