Rone is the project of French musician and sound designer Erwan Castex and this is his first full length release. Spanish Breakfast is a mix of light playful electronica that is comparable to indie acts like Lali Puna, Broadcast, Mum, etc, and more intense deep house/minimal techno such as Pantha Du Price, Lindstrom, Ricardo Villalobos. It’s more of a headphone, home listening album than it is a club-ready rave-up, it can be chilled and playful with some nice and interesting details, but at the same time there are tracks that can be intense, with busy percussion flurries and chest-busting bass, and a lot of the time this happens in the same song.The shorter tracks are usually lighter in tone, but they are out-weighed by the longer ones, which tend to more complex progressions and themes, and feel much more like the meat of what Castex is trying to achieve. ‘Belleville’ is up-tempo and busy, with bubbly taps and clicks working in a 4/4 flurry. As so often happens in the album, a bass lies underneath everything and generates the main thrust of melody, leaving a psychedelic synth to litter the rest of the track. ‘Aya Ama’ is a Balearic track that sounds like it’s being played down the other end of the beach. A comforting central thud of percussion leads you through the track, which has an up-lifting melody generated by keyboard/synth effects and the distorted, mechanized bass, it plays like a vocal-less sister to Gui Boratto’s ‘Beautiful Life’.Although I wouldn’t call the first half of the album lightweight, there is a decidedly more serious turn with the second half. ‘Poisson Pilote’ sounds like it’s being played into an abandoned warehouse for an illegal rave, a siren fades in the background and we get a more overtly mechanical percussion sound, all precise woodblock and processed blips and blops. Big reverby bass and chopped and screwed with vocal samples create an unsettling scene. A slight Science Fiction theme creeps in, starting with ‘Bora Vocal (Alain Damasio Vocal)’, where Damasio (a Science Fiction author) recites some of his work in French. The track consists of delayed sequencer, synth washes that remind me of spaceships taking off, and eventually some harder-edged techno percussion. That last element is continued into next track ‘Tasty City’, after some sort of field recording of a ship yard or something, we get that hard techno moving in a thick mid-tempo. Interestingly a choral melody slowly rises in the background, with synthy accompaniment, and sounds nothing so much as a little snippet of a piece from 2001: A Space Odyssey, but maybe that’s just a passing fancy of mine. Anyway, this half of the album is definitely darker and mechanical, and there are less hand-holds for the average pop-leaning listener.It can be an uneasy concoction, soft poppy electronica with that deeper monochrome beat oriented stuff, but most of the time Castex creates an enjoyable symbiosis. 75%Rone on MySpace