A second album that reset everything its maker had built. Issued in 2000 by City Centre Offices, Tides found Uwe Zahn, working as Arovane, walking quietly away from the cutting-edge IDM grammar he had refined across his earliest EPs and his 1999 debut Atol Scrap, and arriving at something looser, warmer, and far less classifiable. Reissued by Keplar as a remastered LP with new artwork - the first time on vinyl in twenty-two years - it returns one of the genuine high points of turn-of-the-millennium European electronic music.

The shift was deliberate. Where Atol Scrap and the Icol Diston sessions had pursued micro-rhythmic precision and dub-saturated abstraction, Tides took its cues from a holiday on the French coast. Zahn travelled with field recorder in hand. He gathered birdsong, weather, the breath of the sea. Back in Berlin, working with his friend Christian Kleine and digging through Kleine's record collection, he began sampling jazz drum kits and building tracks around them on a hardware sequencer, with no computer in the chain. The harpsichord and zither figures that drift through the record are not period gestures, exactly, but they carry something of an older European music with them, scattered across the surface like flotsam.

What emerges is a record that breathes in a way very little electronic music of its decade did. Theme opens onto a slow procession of brushed drums and harpsichord arpeggios, the rhythm patient and uneven, almost a walk. Seaside and Tomorrow Morning turn briefly toward something brighter and more melodic before the title track unfurls a longer, hazier expanse. A Secret finds Zahn working with the residue of his trip, a piece reportedly tied to an abandoned house and its maps, the music itself pitched between melancholy and rapt attention. The Storm gathers the album's percussive impulses into its most active stretch, a seven-minute piece in which the drums lean forward without ever losing their hand-played feel. Deauville closes the long horizon with a slow car-ride glide along the coast, before Epilogue turns the gaze inward.

It is tempting to reach for Boards of Canada as a reference, and the kinship is real, but Tides sits in its own register. Less nostalgic, more place-bound. Less synthetic, more sampled. A record that has aged into clarity rather than out of it.

Remastered and cut by Kassian Troyer at Dubplates & Mastering, with new cover art by Jim Kühnel based on a photograph by Zahn himself, housed in a die-cut sleeve. Highly recommended.