OR's 'Music for Empty Stadiums' Is a Euphoric Masterpiece of Rave Parts and No Drums
The Sonic Breakdown
Music for Empty Stadiums arrived October 30 on AD 93, which Stereogum notes is the label’s hundredth release — Nic Tasker reached out about the music first. The record was built during lockdown, when Riverola’s tours and club dates had vanished and dance music had stopped interesting him. He shut himself in the studio and made dozens of mostly beatless sketches over a few months.
The Production & Mix
The Low-End: The question Riverola set himself, per The Line of Best Fit, was “What might the most euphoric possible variant of ambient sound like?” The answer mostly declines a kick drum. Bandcamp Daily’s Harry Levin is blunt about the method — “There are no melodies, hooks, or even drum beats; many tracks don’t have any drums at all” — and admiring about the result. The exception is “Nokik Messiah,” the lead single, which Levin says “puts great emphasis on the low-end.”
The Spatial Dynamics: What fills the space instead is the wreckage of club music. Levin hears “broken pieces of those big rave synths that climax at 4 AM under multicolored lights,” and a record that “keeps the upbeat sounds of huge music events, but splatters them all over the place” until “every bit of space is filled with joyous, buzzy blips and bloops.”
Standout Performance
The running order. All seventeen tracks sit in the chronological order they were written — not curated, just lived through. That is why ninety-five minutes works: you are following someone forward in time, from “The Cortisol Arena” to “Serotonin Bliss Blues.”
Why It’s Certified
⚡ Titles that tell you the joke and mean it anyway: “Where’s The Melody,” “Preset Symphony,” “CROWDPLEASER,” “Trancient.”
🌈 The Line of Best Fit calls it “anti-ambient” and a “diaristic document” of a “uniquely distressing time,” and his most substantial work yet.
🌈 Bandcamp Daily made it Album of the Day, hearing it now that the raves have come back as a record that says, simply, “We all made it through.”