Cheju is Wil Bolton – co-owner of UK label, Boltfish recordings. Having released a steady stream of tracks across a multitude of labels in recent years, Bolton decided to put together a personal 12-track selection alongside a trio of commissioned remixes.

In-keeping with the label Cheju represents, Broken Waves specialises in downbeat electronic, glitch and ambient music. In reality, there’s not a lot to Cheju’s compositions, or maybe it just seems like that – simplistic beats and drum patterns motor horizontally, aggrandized by prettily melodic chip-tunes.

Sometimes the results are pleasant – in a primitive way, particularly the tracks labelled Pachinko, Blanchot, and Pantone, other times Cheju reverts to a predictable IDM format, whereby to make the production more remarkable the beats are deliberately scrunched, granulated and distorted.

Overall, the result is like listening to a poor man’s Mike Paradinas, as Cheju mostly struggles to transcend the ordinary by varying the content or shifting moods both within tracks and as a whole. By that I mean, once you’ve heard the first 30 seconds of a track, you’ve pretty much heard it all.

The closing two remixes, by Electricwest and Preston, are two of the stronger tracks on the album, the closing Preston remix of Bellflowerroot only has to add a flamenco guitar vibe to lift the production above the ordinary and give the music a semblance of emotion.

Broken Waves is not a bad album by any means and if you like safe and predictable IDM you might like this. However, for me it fails to distinguish itself above a deluge of IDM releases from bygone days; perhaps it suffers from the predictability and cyclical nature of the genre itself.