Dusting down an alias first unveiled in the mid-’90s, John Beltran returns to his long-cherished Placid Angles project with Canada, a record that feels less like a nostalgic revival and more like a lucid continuation. If 1996’s Ten Days of Blue painted Detroit techno in watercolours, and 1997’s The Cry dissolved its rhythms into something almost devotional, then Canada refracts those same pastel hues through three further decades of lived-in experience. The result is supple, expansive and quietly assured.
Beltran has long been Detroit techno’s foremost romantic, a producer for whom melody isn’t an adornment but the main event. Early landmarks such as Earth & Nightfall established his gift for harmonies that seemed to hover just above the grid, percussion flickering like distant constellations rather than driving the dancefloor. Over time he drifted into jazz, ambient and post-rock territories, leaving the Placid Angles moniker dormant until a new generation – most notably Lone – encouraged its revival.
On 2019’s First Blue Sky and 2021’s Touch the Earth, Beltran reacquainted himself with the project’s gauzy textures. But Canada, the fourth Placid Angles LP, feels different. It shifts shape track by track: lush techno gives way to yearning ambient, which in turn tilts towards deep house and crisp-edged breakbeat. Where earlier records sometimes seemed content to drift, this one pulses with renewed intent.
That charge is partly down to the younger collaborators woven into its second half. Leeds producer Tom VR lends “Tides Alternate” a muscular breakbeat backbone, forcing Beltran’s billowing pads to stretch and slow in counterpoint. Bristol’s Yushh brings a wirier, more club-focused energy to “Wildfire”, where muffled vocal fragments rub against a beat that threatens to spill fully onto the floor. The friction is productive: Beltran’s narcotic strings soften the impact without diluting it.
Most striking is “I Want What I Want”, featuring Vancouver vocalist Sophia Stel. Her voice—intimate, resonant, sometimes splintered into vaporous shards—anchors the track even as restless breakbeats shuffle beneath. It’s the album’s emotional centre of gravity, proof that Beltran’s long-standing fascination with texture and atmosphere needn’t come at the expense of human presence. Elsewhere, disembodied voices drift in and out of the title track and “Reminds Me of the Rain”, surfacing like half-remembered conversations.
The album’s bookends are tellingly utopian. “Sainte Anne” swells from trembling guitar motifs into a vast bass drone, while “Sweet Morning Dream” thrums beatlessly, its euphoria diffused like early sunlight through mist. These are widescreen pieces, almost formless in structure yet rich in feeling – soundtracks to imagined landscapes in bloom. Beltran has cited travel in Canada as inspiration, and you can hear it in the sense of open skies and unhurried horizons.
There’s nostalgia here, certainly – Beltran still speaks of breakbeats as relics from a simpler era – but Canada never feels trapped by the past. Instead, it suggests an artist comfortable enough with his legacy to bend it into new shapes. In an age when much electronic music chases either brute functionality or ironic detachment, there’s something quietly radical about Beltran’s unabashed idealism. Placid Angles remains what it has always been: a space for reverie, for sketches of tenderness, for melodies that refuse to harden.
Three decades on, the daydream continues – only now, it carries the weight and wisdom of time.
