vinylfanatics.com

**Tarentel - Ghetto Beats On The Surface Of The Sun**
★★★★☆

In the sprawling landscape of early 2000s post-rock, where Godspeed You! Black Emperor's apocalyptic symphonies and Mogwai's quiet-loud dynamics dominated the conversation, San Francisco's Tarentel carved out their own peculiar niche with an approach that felt less like a manifesto and more like a fever dream. Their 2001 opus "Ghetto Beats On The Surface Of The Sun" stands as perhaps their most cohesive statement—a record that sounds like it was beamed down from some distant, melancholic planet where hip-hop beats collide with ambient textures in the most beautiful possible way.

Emerging from the Bay Area's experimental underground in the late '90s, Tarentel had already established themselves as sonic alchemists with their earlier releases, blending found sounds, field recordings, and traditional instrumentation into something that defied easy categorization. The quintet—Danny Grody, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, Trevor Montgomery, Patricia Kavanaugh, and Kenseth Thibideau—approached music-making like archaeologists of sound, digging through the detritus of modern life to uncover hidden beauty.

The album's title perfectly encapsulates its contradictory nature: the earthbound grittiness of urban beats set against the cosmic immensity of solar surfaces. This isn't post-rock as typically understood, nor is it ambient music in any traditional sense. Instead, Tarentel crafts something entirely their own—a kind of post-everything approach that incorporates elements of dub, krautrock, minimal techno, and drone music into a cohesive whole that never feels forced or academic.

Opening track "Steede Bonnet" immediately establishes the band's modus operandi, with a hypnotic drum loop serving as the foundation for layers of treated guitar, analog synthesizer washes, and field recordings that drift in and out of focus like half-remembered dreams. It's music that rewards both active listening and passive absorption, functioning equally well as foreground fascination or ambient accompaniment to late-night contemplation.

The album's centerpiece, "Ghetto Beats," lives up to its titular promise with a groove that's simultaneously skeletal and deeply funky. Over nearly eight minutes, the track builds from a simple hip-hop-influenced beat into something approaching transcendence, with melodic fragments emerging from the mix like sunlight breaking through clouds. It's here that Tarentel's genius becomes most apparent—their ability to find the sublime within the mundane, to transform basic elements into something genuinely moving.

"Paper Figures" represents perhaps the album's most successful marriage of rhythm and atmosphere, with a shuffling breakbeat providing the backbone for layers of processed guitar and synthesizer that seem to breathe and pulse with organic life. The track feels like a transmission from some alternate timeline where Aphex Twin collaborated with Labradford, all skeletal rhythms and gossamer melodies that dissolve before you can fully grasp them.

The lengthy "From Bone To Satellite" serves as the album's emotional core, a 13-minute journey through shifting textures and moods that never outstays its welcome. Beginning with what sounds like distant radio transmissions and gradually building into a wall of treated guitars and analog electronics, the track demonstrates Tarentel's mastery of dynamics and space. It's music that exists in the gaps between genres, occupying a liminal space that feels both ancient and futuristic.

What makes "Ghetto Beats On The Surface Of The Sun" so enduring is its refusal to commit to any single aesthetic or approach. This is restless, searching music that's content to ask questions rather than provide answers. The production, handled by the band themselves, captures their sound with remarkable clarity while maintaining an appropriately hazy, dreamlike quality that serves the material perfectly.

In the years since its release, the album has gained recognition as a minor classic of early 2000s experimentalism, influencing a generation of musicians working at the intersection of electronic and organic sounds. While Tarentel continued to evolve and eventually disbanded in the mid-2000s, "Ghetto Beats On The Surface Of The Sun" remains their most fully realized statement—a record that sounds as otherworldly today as it did two decades ago.

This is music for the small hours, for long drives through empty landscapes, for moments when the ordinary world reveals its hidden strangeness.