‘It Takes Time’ is the new album by Rimini-born artist & Mixed Up label head Danilo Betti aka April Clocks, a record of reverie and primitivism, haze and grit, surge and drift. Dream states and unfiltered minimalism from the Adriatic.
After devoting his attention to the output of Mixed Up until 2019 - releasing records by the likes of Pearl River Sound, Your Planet is Next & X.Y.R. - Betti adjusted his focus, concentrating on the development of his studio and the refinement of his own productions, Betti followed up the debut April Clocks EP ‘Due Lune’ with an album entitled ‘Deaf Youth'.
With ‘It Takes Time’, Betti employs a different approach, applying an autodidactic framework to the formative influences of the project. Where previously, Betti envisaged April Clocks as a vehicle for reconfiguring and expanding elements of industrial and techno, ‘It Takes Time’ explores the project’s inceptive, seminal connection with shoegaze and ambient music, representing an original interpretation of the records Betti was listening to at the outset of his musical trajectory.
Across nine tracks of hypnagogic mirage and raw, enervated momentum, Betti embodies his first aesthetic impressions of shoegaze and ambient, before he’d even heard any of the music, articulating the ideas and projections he formed at the point of encountering these terms - and the albums and artists associated with them - in specialist press publications. Betti visualized a ‘crude, slippery, and hypnotic’ sound, and on ‘It Takes
Time’ reproduces the individuality of his initial conceptions. For Betti, this constitutes creative replication rather than rigorous fidelity; improvisation and vintage Japanese synthesizers rather than Oblique Strategies and dissonant guitars. An adaptation; different tools, same spirit.
Replete with soundscapes of disembodied deluge and vaporous, otherworldly interludes, ‘It Takes Time’ is an album shaped by listening and influence, which is nevertheless true and distinctive, marked by contrast and divergence. Immersive atmospherics intersect with austere, understated foundations, as crude drum machine rhythms punctuate languorous, gauzelike transmissions. On ‘Blue Blood II’, contorted, minor key electronics swim against thudding percussion, and on ‘Radical Tears’ enshrouded drones resound and fade between cyclical drum programming; highlights which evoke a memorable sense of crepuscular melancholia. In these moments, and throughout ‘It Takes Time’, Betti strikes a fine balance between physicality and intangibility.
With ‘The Gentle / I’d Rather Be Dreaming’ Betti references Grouper, an artist whose early material proved revelatory to the evolution of April Clocks. The imprint of this influence, the work of Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, as
well as the late 00s / early 2010s output of Type, Editions Mego, and Kranky, can be heard across ‘It Takes Time’, but the inscriptions are subtle, reframed. Integrating the amorphous impressionism of these
touchstones with the kind of imperfect futurism found on Warp’s Artificial Intelligence compilations, as well as in the work of Seefeel and Boards of Canada, April Clocks assembles a unique work of imaginative faculty on ‘It Takes Time’.
Poised between structure and abstraction, science and romance, Betti describes ‘It Takes Time’ as an album of ‘constant tension’, defined by ‘an unresolved ambivalence’. A record about ‘dreams, sleep, euphoria, love’.
Within this open-ended work, Betti captures the dualities of art and music, perception and experience, conveying multitudes.