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# devonwho :: tv2
- URL: https://www.hwaelmag.com/devonwho-tv2/
- Published: 2026-10-21T08:45:21.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-21T09:02:58.000Z
- Description: Drumless electronica: devonwho lets arpeggios do the work of the beat.
- Author: Hwael Mag
- Tags: Album Reviews, 2026, Electronica

### On *tv2* the drums are barely there, and the funk has to make do: the time is kept by the arpeggios, which fall thick, insist, and every so often land on the wrong chord.

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In the circle of West Coast beatmakers that Devon Fox comes from, a producer is known by the hit of the drum: a snare dragged just behind the beat, a sample cut a moment too soon. That was the grammar of Klipmode, the collective that at the end of the 2000s kept him in the same room as Mndsgn, Knxwledge and Suzi Analogue. Heard with that memory, *tv2*sounds like a record someone has knocked off its centre. The loop is still there, and it is the one thing devonwho carries over intact from that trade. What’s missing are the hits that usually make it walk. Ten years have passed since the *Lyon*EP, also released on Leaving Records, and five since his last new music. This time he works on hardware, recording cycles as they play, with patches that are born and wear out within a single session.

The work of the drums falls, then, to the arpeggiator, which is by nature already a rhythmic device: it takes the chord apart into regular pulses and lines them up again. Here it is given one more task. It has to make the missing bass felt and shift the accent to where the kick no longer reaches, until the groove can be sensed even with no one there to play it. Devon makes no secret of his fondness for arpeggios, which slip into practically every track. Nor does he hide his debt to early Warp, back when English electronic music was learning to sing without a voice.

[tv2 by devonwho](https://devonwho.bandcamp.com/album/tv2?ref=hwaelmag.com) 

That lineage is also why the Orbital of *In Sides (1996)* come to mind on the first few listens, and stay there until the resemblance starts to show its seams. The levels of the individual loops are abrupt and ill-mannered, left raw as though nobody had cared to even them out. In the low register certain notes act as bass and percussion at once, holding the pace and then breaking it. Above them run Andalusian cadences rendered synthetic, Phrygian descents that pass through modal jazz and the English nineties. The funk is heard in the way the phrases push against one another, more than in anything you could count by tapping your foot.

Nineteen tracks, nearly all of them short. devonwho says he made them with his eyes closed, one moment after another, and a method like that might leave behind a scatter of unfinished sketches. Instead each idea arrives complete at its own length, and the brevity never sounds like a cut. For him the loop is first of all a way of listening, and the sequence makes that clear: the running order decides the balance of the record, where the ear rests and how long an arpeggio can keep returning before it asks for a change.

The double vinyl spreads the nineteen pieces across three sides. The fourth bears only the label’s laser-etched logo. After the last loop of “pm” what remains is a surface turning on the platter and transmitting nothing, and only then does the title, which Devon suggests can be read as *transmissions vol. 2*, seem complete.

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