International Call Centre’s Targets has a sound and musical style that’s perfectly on point.
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Graphic designer and music producer Daniel Adams makes music under the International Call Centre moniker. He says the name is influenced by 90s electronic music that relied on atmosphere and rising tension to set heartbeats racing rather than bass drops. On Targets, its debut album, International Call Centre dials in a spare, minimalist aesthetic based on repeated loops and motifs.
There’s a well-worn lustre to “Rise”, as if, in Adams’s words it was “found on a cassette tape that was overplayed and thrown down the stairs a few times.” “Who” dances into the night on a deep trance vibe, while the one-two punch of openers “Ease Pt. 1” and “Ease Pt. 2” pulses and struts like the sinister sister of Deee-Lite’s early 90s classic “What Is Love?”
Adams’s designer’s eye is a key ingredient to International Call Centre’s sound, colouring in Targets’s basic shapes with cinematic swatches of colour. The beats and sinewy synths are synesthetic, experienced both audibly as well as through the other senses, as if you could see the music taking physical form in front of your eyes. It’s a sound and musical style that’s perfectly on point.
