Jul 25th, 2025

Taken from ‘Beautiful Broken’ by Digitonal
Order and stream it: https://snd.click/beautifulbroken

It’s hard for me to look at Beautiful Broken some ten years after its original release without considering change. Whilst it was written over many years, its release was a watershed moment of transformation, where I tore down my life and built afresh. It’s the most explicit in it’s influences of all my records, with the album bookended by ‘Proverb’ and ‘Eighteen’ – directly referencing minimalist giant Steve Reich – and some nods to the way in which the genre of IDM (which Digitonal has always been uncomfortably linked with), often recontextualised minimalism within dance music culture. Elsewhere, the lyricism of Sami Bishai’s playing on Luna is something I go back to often, and bittersweet since life would pull us into different directions after this record. Ironically, for an album in which repetitive melodic cycles feature so heavily, it ultimately broke me out of my patterns and tropes and helped me grow as an artist, going on to find new collaborators and a very different approach to life and music. As such, it stands as a strange monument to the tense relationship that all artists have with their work and its evolution. At the time, it felt like catharsis, now it feels like a cosy friend.

Andy Dobson, Suffolk, July 2025