Opting for a more free-form approach, Roberto Romero Molina’s new album explores and embraces the unexpected, feeling like a glitch-ambient fever dream. 

Tijuana’s Roberto Romero Molina has been in the “ambient game” for some time now, so he is no stranger to its methods. His approach to it, for the most part, has been based around adventurous, yet meticulous, processes, and his body of recorded work has been pretty consistent on that regard, and although he has mastered the use of different tools to achieve his goals, he admittedly had been limiting himself to fit the “nice and tidy” aesthetics of the genre. For this new release, though, he decided to take a very different path, opting for a more free-form approach that explores, and embraces, the unexpected -and the undesired for some-, feeling more like a glitch-ambient fever dream, than a relaxing stroll through the beach.

Magnetic Lake immediately makes its statement starting with a sort of anti-climax, with the opening track being a very brief drone that stops abruptly, giving way to a humming sound of “Rivers of Being”; this dynamic feels as if Roberto accidentally removed the cable from his synthesizer all of a sudden, and then decided to make a piece around the buzzing sound of an unplugged cable. This brief moment perfectly sets up the whole thesis of the album, though there’s more to come, as Magnetic Lake is not only rich in dynamics, but due to its improvisational approach, it’s also full of different techniques, and styles, because Roberto used all of the tools at his disposal to create these pieces.

There are moments reminiscent of the early days of industrial music, glitching loops that create rhythmic stutters, tape flutter, white noise, feedback, playful sample manipulation, and even some downright old-school dark ambient bits, all of which keep the album from feeling too dense across its hour and forty minutes, even when, at its core, we are experiencing Molina’s darkest, and more chaotic side. The sound sources -at least the ones that are recognizable- are varied as well, and some are presented as is, in a genuine display of transparency: We can hear a casual conversation bluntly ending when someone “ruins the mood” making an unexpectedly loud noise with a synth.

Can this album be classified as ambient? Not in the pure sense, but it also doesn’t feel like a gimmicky attempt at redefining a genre with unnecessary genre mashups or banal stylization. This is a raw portrait of an artist creating for the sake of creating, which in this era of over-saturation, feels more sincere than your run-of-the-mill, overly polished ambient project that expects immediate attention because they’re using tape loops or expensive equipment to evoke nostalgia. Roberto is taking us with him while he is exploring and discovering a whole new side of himself -like a kid showing us his new toys and they stories he has come up with-, sharing the intimacy and freedom of improvising on our own without any expectations. This feels more personal than showing us the polished end results.