Bot1500 - The Black Sea
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Bot1500 - The Black Sea
Holdrons Arcade
135A Rye Lane
Unit 11 Holdrons Arcade
London SE15 4ST
United Kingdom
Label: Short Span – SHORT12
Format: LP, Vinyl
Country: UK
Released: June 15, 2026
Genre: Electronic
Style: Ambient, IDM
Shinichi Kobayashi's second album as Bot1500 arrives on Short Span — his first since Surreal on AD93's sister label Lith Dolina in 2022 — and The Black Sea marks a significant deepening of an already distinctive and highly individual sound. Spaces things out further, focuses inward, and leans increasingly into the principles and logic of dub: more silence, more simplicity, more focus on the elegance of composition folded into radiant arrangements of melody, snare, shade and echo.
The album's mood hangs over a specific image — a dark humid summer night on a Japanese coast, a small boat sailing aimlessly, an eerie tone with a glimpse of beauty beneath it. The water is melancholic, enveloping and endless. Artfully arranged pads and chords sit alongside crisp vectored breaks across tracks written at 140bpm throughout, the emotional resonance building slowly across the record before closing cut White Flocks shifts to 120bpm — heading south, the mood softening into something more open and unhurried as the album draws to a close. Ambient IDM with a dub sensibility, an inner landscape and a geographic image held in careful, luminous balance.
