To put it as bluntly as possible without a veil of irony, Saddleback’s latest album, Night Maps, is gold. Australian producer Tony Dupe’s solo project, in his latest effort, has presented a collection of meticulously arranged sonic essays that sound like nothing else, yet openly and intimately communicate emotionally with a listener. The music unfolds like a story, snippets of piano, clarinets, violin, cello, drums, double bass and guitar taking the role of characters, weaving through and around each other in an interactive dialogue. Night Maps is a journey, eight beautiful sketches of a place and time no other artist could convey so clearly.

There is no doubt that the space in which Dupe works finds itself at the centre of Night Maps’ construction, whether peering through cracks into the mix in analogue background noise, or more obvious samples from the natural sounds that surround him. Dupe is based in a rural valley, near the South Coast of New South Wales – a green sanctuary from human activity. Most notably “For Crying Out Loud” is treated to an aurally astonishing sample of birdcall that fits superbly with the atmosphere of the track, placed at its most appropriate moment. The arrangement of the various instruments employed in this album themselves convey a distinct sense of place, carrying an individuality and character that is so often lost in impersonal, perfectionist, digital recording.

The greatest attraction I found in Night Maps, however, was the overwhelmingly potent result that Dupe achieved from splicing together small, fractured musical sounds that only make sense when arranged as they are here. Lovingly recorded snippets of seemingly independent instrumental noodlings operating in their own space are brought together like pieces into a jigsaw puzzle, a mountain of meaningless syllables arranged into musical syntax.

The best example of Dupe’s language in action is the jaw-dropping third track, “Rain In Sea”. Based around loops of minimal, simple musical sounds and idea, the piece’s growth is utterly brilliant, even with a hint of artistic flippancy, beginning initially with the barely audible sounds of a music box, growing with the gradual addition of a short ambient keyboard loop. Each musical part shifts in balance throughout, as the relative chaos of the beginning works itself into an ordered, minimalistic growth of each element through repetition and minute change. Towards the tail end of the piece, ambient loops give way to repeated figures in cello and clarinet, which on top of the intensity of the previous section adds stunning rhythmic variety. Subsequently elements of both sections are combined in a final, bone-crushingly beautiful build-up, enveloping all around it, and concluding suddenly with a tauntingly simple music box chord, almost trivializing the density of the six minutes that come before it but failing to detract from its brilliance.

And here we come to the approach of Tony Dupe, the reasoning behind why the result is achieved. Night Maps is a series of sophisticated and even cheeky arrangements of a huge volume of source sounds, Dupe exploiting their imperfections and character, as well as bringing them into an intricate form and structure. Where the process and result of much music produced nowadays is easily understood and easily recognized, Dupe’s approach to constructing music is beyond me. Everything that has passed through Dupe’s hands in this album, regardless of what it means alone, has turned to gold.

Night Maps is musical alchemy. Tiny sounds, instrumental soliloquies, loving fractions of music brought together into flawless harmony; a sum, a result greater than its parts.

- Marcus Whale