I’d really like to see these songs with some visuals, each time I listen to a song I imagine a new thing, like right now the track “King of 1998″ off of the new album “Blue Sky Objective” might call to mind a patch of flowers sprouting, growing, flowering, dying, and decomposing on loop over the course of 3 years or a city street done in stop motion photography for a week with people blurring past. Try thinking of your own visuals, it’s fun. The synths, handclaps, and spare garbled over processed vocals combine to make some truly ethereal and above all honest sounds. Even though all of the sounds are electronic, there is a stark sincerity to them. I’m not sure if the masterful production or the hauntingly simple melodies that evoke the feelings of childlike wonder, but they both work together to make a surprisingly satisfying result.

Our most personal experience was at I Am Robot and Proud, or rather DJ Emulsion, since the Robot as advertised was stuck in Canada. Don’t ask, we don’t know either. Left to our own devices as our companion took part in the chess tournament outside, we were free to enjoy the minimal, mostly cheerful blips and bloops that issued forth from Emulsion’s laptops, set to a visual panoply of random, disjointed images. Initially we thought it’d be a dance set like MF Chicago, but the exhibit exemplified low-key with just two tables and the projected visuals. As a result, people got bored and there was a high turnover. We didn’t care. These were the people who wanted to see the show for novelty. We figure their line of thinking was, “Robots?! Cool! I’m in!” without knowing it’d be electronic music. While we would have rather had a dance floor going, we were grateful for the experience. It was also the only time we spent any money in the Loop. We certainly can’t say that very often.

Nathan Koch, the man behind Blue Sky Objective, revels in the synthetics of the 1980s and 1990s. Indeed, the album shares significant common ground with the fuzzy warmth Boards of Canada reclaims from the 1960s and 1970s. You wonder just how much Koch recognizes that, as chief among the similarities are two consecutive tracks, “Tweeism” and “New High Score,” that in name and in sound tweak well-respected BoC EPs.

Emulsion treads so lightly here with such spare arrangements that you might at times think, “Hey, even I could play that.” That leaves the album a few missteps away from bad science fiction and crime drama scores. Yet the handclap-and-high-hat atmospheres of songs like “LeftRightLeftRight” and “All Robots on Sale!” also revisit a time when the electro of Paul Hardcastle, Kraftwerk, and Laid Back could fit into rap DJ sets.

The tension in tracks like “Without” (full of video-game explosions) and “Balloons and Centipedes” (which could be re-imagined as the fanfare echoing through the halls of the castle in Atari’s Adventure) comes with a sense of detached observation that makes it something much more soothing. It may not be what Koch wanted, but Blue Sky Objective certainly puts the “comfort” into cold comfort. - Adam Blyweiss

The album’s opening track, “LeftRightLeftRight,” sets the mood for the rest of the record in both style and sounds. It seems as though Koch uses the same basic handclapped beats and synth sounds throughout the whole album to create a soft, melancholy mood. While this monotony can be a bit boring at times it does creates a uniform sound of minimalist beauty.

“King of 1998″ starts with a distorted drum beat and a floating melody but with a 1:48 track time it fails to build up into the epic song it could be. Koch does keep things fresh throughout the album with a variety of glitches and beeps that sound like they were almost taken directly from the video games he played when he spent a year as a lead Game Boy tester in San Francisco.

Overall, Blue Sky Objective flows well and stays in a dark mid-tempo ambient mood highlighted by traces of melodic pop in songs like “All Robots on Sale” and “Tweeism.” My main problem with this album is that most of the songs just fade out. The last track, “You Were All There,” starts with an urgent arpeggiated synth line and lush ambient sounds but from there the song just slowly floats back to the tranquil mood that dominates the whole album.

Blue Sky Objective is a strong debut nonetheless and the monotony is more than made up for with solid songwriting and intriguing melodies. This is a definitely a very relaxed album, perfect for after the party, while coming down and watching the sun rise.

While “leftrightleftright” opens the disc with a pretty standard synth sound, the listener quickly gets a taste of Emulsion’s ability to blend mood and texture into the mix on the next track, “King of 1998”. The rest of the disc plays very much the same way, with tracks like “All Robots on Sale!” staying true to the disc’s synth pop roots but allowing for plenty of experimentation on tracks like “New High Score”. The album’s experimentation comes at a price, though. While tracks like “Balloons and Centipedes” prove that it is possible to express some moments of supremely tranquil beauty without getting sappy, “Smeared Bus Window” plays with even more sounds and takes them in even more directions and winds up sounding cluttered at times.

While there’s plenty of the eight-bit synth vibe to go around with tracks like the title track, this disc also offers the listener tracks like “Without” and “Shapes and Colors”, which approach the ambient sound of artists like Solvent. The disc is a solid choice for fans of the house sound who are looking for something a bit more emotiveunder blue skies is the objective. -LarryMac

Even with the mix of bleeps and other IDM sounds you will notice that there is intelligent song writing going on here while keeping it rather simple. As I said before there are plenty of poppy moments but there is also a darker side to the electronics. After really giving Emulison a chance I realized that this album definitely has a lot to offer. I tried going in to this CD with an open mind as I am still trying to get into more IDM sounds. No, this CD won’t be one for the dancefloor, but this is one CD that will be good to just sit down and listen to after a long day. It leaves a calming feeling while you still get your electronic fix a little more stripped down. It is amazing to see how Koch’s experimentalism can turn into such electronic beauty and how the music can bring texture to ones mind. Recommend tracks would be: “Shapes and Colors” and “Balloons and Centipedes” and “Smeared Bus Window”. - Julie Johnson