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Endaural Blog
Essential Reading:
How To Buy Music When You Don't Have To - A long essay about buying music.
Grab Bag '22 - A page that will show you 10 good releases from 2022, randomly generated when the page loads
It's A Jumble '22 - A page that will show you writing about some good releases from 2022, in a random order.
Grab Bag '23 - A page that will show you 10 good releases from 2023, randomly generated when the page loads
Autocritic '23 - A genuine and accurate music critic simulator for the music of 2023, with new opinions generated when the page loads.
07/04/24
Endaural Hour - Episode 001
[Mixcloud Stream] / [Direct Download]
TRACKLIST:
Paul Abbott - Gravity Variation-0 (4:38)
nnirror - 3+||=E (5:42)
Quartabê - Não tem solução (3:19)
Maria Portugal - Cheio/Vazio (4:27)
Maria Beraldo - Da Menor Importância (3:02)
Hrvatski - Paint It Black (4:46)
Ricki Wiedenof - Raptured in Formal Violence (6:05)
Nochexxx - Infected People (4:27)
BAUR - Terowongan Jadi Underpass (11:41)
SCRIPT:
Welcome to the Endaural Hour, I'm your host, Alex Tripp.
Our first music for today will be two relatively recent releases. We've got the first track from Paul Abbott's brand new album "Knees, Elbow Bag", as well as something off of nnirror's new one, "makesgons".
This music might be experimental, but if anyone tried to fight me about that, I would find a way to politely escape the conversation. I've never really cared about innovation in a precise, record keeping kind of way. If I get blown away by something that came out in September of 1979, but then I find out that someone else was already working in a similar area in *August* of 1979, or even in any of the early months and years, I don't think that diminishes the later release at all. I just need the sense that the artist is stepping forward into something unknown, for myself and for them. If they didn't know about the thing that I didn't know about, that just makes them more relatable as people. Maybe the historians will come out and say that these are *not* certified fresh, but I'd still believe they're capturing the excitement of the new.
We'll start with Abbott's piece, 'Gravity Variation 0". It might give you a little startle off the bat, it's a mass of sharp hypercolor static sounds, like listening to a magic eye poster without being able to see the magic picture. But soon, it seems as though drums start to cut thru the noise, not as an audible component of the music, but as something offscreen, leaving us to hear the reaction from the synthetic sound. At least, that's what I think is happening, I've tried to do a bit of research but I'll admit, I could have done more. But, whatever it is that is happening, there's a sense of a dimensional illusion that appears in the sound, it would make sense to call it gravity, it feels like witnessing the immaterial get struck by embodiment and sent crashing down to earth. So if you start to get a bit scared during the opening noise, just try to remember that you're hanging in there for something really, really *cool*.
The piece from nnirror that follows is significantly different, because Abbott's work is the type of thing that feels like a large portion of the substance could never be expressed in a reduced format like a score. It comes down *into* the recording, with the experience of its timbre being a vital component of what it is. But nnirror works in the field of live coding, the music starts with some lines of text, attributes getting numbers assigned to them, something equals 80, another thing equals 6, this measure gets this one event 40% of the time that it gets looped, a bunch of instructions like that. And from that, the music emerges. Now, I can't say that I know how all this stuff works, especially since nnirror built his own custom system. He put the whole thing up on GitHub but I haven't really looked at what it can do. But I think I can grasp enough of it. In this piece, titled 3 plus two vertical lines equals E, the music gives a sense of following a linear path, getting from A to B, but it's like time's light scatters differently over everything in the scene, with adjustments that all differ in scale but maintain a proportional relationship. There's something I find so engaging in the depth of interconnectedness to all of the distinct instruments, like they're all driven by something complex to begin with, but they're also seem to send out ripples of influence to all the other voices. It is outstanding. So, lets give these two a listen now!
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Even though these two pieces of music had their differences, I think both of their engagements with live performance in electronic music are offering experiences that could only be brought to us today. While they maybe aren't *categorically new*, because people have been doing this sort of stuff for a long time, I think nnirror and Paul Abbott are both bringing something fresh to the category. And not just in a technological arms race kind of way. Like, if you understand this music technology as a means of mechanically extending a human action, like those gundam robots where someone climbs inside, they move their hand, and that gesture translates into a big robot hand doing a move, it could become easy to conceptualize progress in this area as a series of increasingly larger and more complicated gundams. But I think its the specific actions that are being taken that give this new music its newness, its about the way that Abbott saw a recipe to make gravity, and how nnirror saw the new ways of convoluting a path. It's not that they're bringing us bigger gundams, it feels more like their contribution is the types of battles they wage.
Now, we will be changing gears a bit, and turn towards Brazil, home of the band Quartabê. I don't actually know them too well, but I'm a big fan of one of the members, Maria Portugal. She had this great album in 2021 that I stumbled on by chance, it does an art pop sort of thing with a very compelling mix of jazzy and electronic approaches, it's actually really weird that it is not more widely known, people should be all over this.
I'd listened to a bit of Quartabê before when I first encountered Maria Portugal, but I never went too deep. I can be very slow with this kind of branching out through artistic affiliations, especially when the next branch I hear isn't immediately engaging to me in the same sense as the previous branch. And also, the group is very deliberately engaging in a musical lineage, making their study of Moacir Santos and Dorival Caymmi an explicit component of how the music is presented. And it's like, on the one hand, awesome! I've never heard music from these people, now I have more music to check out! I get to potentially hear really good music for the *first time*, which is always the best feeling. But on the other hand, this acknowledged weight of history can make me feel like I have homework, I get too much in my head about *having* to do something rather than *getting* to do something, and it saps my energy completely. So, I have not listened to much of this band. But, just the other week, I was checking Maria Portugal's bandcamp page and sure enough, there was a new album from Quartabê up there, and I decided to give it a whirl.
It's really good! It's still a bit new to me, so I'm not ready to speak on it with much depth, and it really challenges my ability to read it as a coherent object so I'm a little bit uncertain about how to talk about it. There's these tracks where it's just four people on guitar and voice, sometimes going really loose and flexible on the timings, and they all feature an interpolation of this one song by Caymmi. But then there's two poppy tracks with guest vocalists and tight rhythms, a samba jazz track, and an instrumental that sounds like it could easily fit in alongside some Anna Meredith, or maybe even some Battles. It would be easier to understand the album if it was a full-on variety pack, but the ways that some individual tracks are contributing to something bigger than themselves has me puzzling, I want to find a way to make them all make sense together. And I haven't! I'll probably have to do my homework.
While I'm trying to figure out this album, I've also got to answer the question I've been postponing, who is this band? What is their deal? One of the traps that I tend to fall into when trying to come to an understanding is that I'll try looking at the band as a showcase for one individual's brilliance. So, there are some truly incredible things happening with the drums on the Maria Portugal album. Like on the first track, it starts out with this skeletal two hit drum loop, as bare bones as it gets, and that's all you get from that instrument for a while. But then, just shy of the 2 minute mark, the whole thing *explodes* and you get this skittering glitchy beat with a large vocabulary. So that got me thinking, "since Maria Portugal is the drummer in Quartabê, and since she is *literally* on the record in her own work, being cool with the drums, it stands to reason that she is the driving force behind the cool rhythm stuff happening in this group." That sounds reasonable, right?
OK, so fast forward a couple of days, and I saw someone online offering to take you on a musical discovery adventure through Brazil, you just have to say a genre that you're interested. I decided to say that I'm already into Brazillian music, and I mention some older artists as well as Maria Portugal. He comes back at me with a recommendation to check out Maria Beraldo. She's got this album from 2018, Cavala, and I was blown away when I heard it! I'm not quite sure how to describe it, she plays clarinet, and there's lots of electronics, so I probably could use the same language I used for the Maria Portugal album. But the two experiences are really distinct, Beraldo's feels more song oriented, and she uses that orientation to bring a wider range of styles into a shorter span of time.
So I start to look up a bit more about Beraldo, and I see she's in a group. The group is called Quartabê. The band has two Marias! So, this changes everything. I can't confidently say that Maria Portugal is the driving force behind the rhythm stuff happening in the group, because now I have clear evidence that there is another member who also does cool rhythm stuff! I have been humbled.
OK, that's enough yakking. Lets take a listen to all this music now. First, we'll start with the Quartabê track that reminded me of Anna Meredith, and then we'll go to that first track off the Maria Portugal album, and then we'll have a listen to something from Maria Beraldo, a track titled Da Menor Importância.
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Welcome back! Next up, we'll be looking at some pieces of music that makes me want to draw connections, but I'm not sure if they're entirely justified. First up: the Paint it Black cover that Keith Fullerton Whitman made under his Hrvatski alias, and the second track off of Ricki Weidenhof's new album "Church".
The differences between these two tracks are quite significant. Weidenhof is more willing to have the drums cleanly divide time, and also has more cleanly divided segments. They both have a bit of a twisting structure, but the Hrvatski track keeps a more solid continuity, there will an element carrying over between segments, an uninterrupted connective tissue, while Weidenhof seems much more willing to drop everything. But I'd still say these two songs belong together. You won't even notice the transition between them! There's something about the temperatures, the atmospheres, the uses of that technique where drums turn into glitchy sounding overlap tones... I don't know, maybe these are just superficial connections. Or *maybe* my intuitive brain is a lot faster and smarter than my conscious brain, and I just haven't fully realized the actual connections. They both have lots of great twists and turns... maybe they're prog? Maybe that's it? Maybe both of these two songs are prog? Well, that's up to you to decide.
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Our final music for the show will be another connection that I don't fully understand, but it's one I believe in Something off of the Nochexxx album from 2015, "Plot Defender", and then something from earlier this year on this really cool label DIVISI62. They're based in Indonesia, they put out that gamelan techno album from Uwalmassa back in 2022. The track is called Terowongan Jadi Underpass, and it's by BAUR, spelled B A U R, different from that other artist with the similar name. Both of these tracks are on some kind of odd techno styles, a bit rough around the edges. And they seem like they're carrying genuine heat, as well as the physical toll that comes along with that temperature. They don't ever feel sleepy at all, but it feels like there's a bit of drag on their efforts, like we come in and the sweating is already in progress. But once again, there are some significant differences in this pairing. The BAUR track has this maniacal devotion to horizontal progress, like it's all pure drive the whole way thru, with flashes of odd sounds that pass by like the scenery outside a car window. The Nochexx track is much more directly playful, with a lot of building up to big moments that pare down into smaller ones. So again, I'm not quite sure if they totally make sense together. But I kind of think they do!
It looks like we'll be pushing over one hour here, so these tracks will take us to the end of the show. Since this is called the Endaural Hour, it seems like I should probably get this thing to last for exactly one hour. But this is the first episode, I'm sure I'll get the timing right for future episodes. I hope you've enjoyed, and I'll see you next time!
07/03/24
You may have noticed that the efforts to create an aggregated news page on this site have all ceased the past few months. The explanation is simple: I couldn't continue looking at the social media where I would gather up these headlines. Social media is a machine that is designed to give everyone the worst thing they've ever heard, every single day. And I am in one of the demographics with the greatest competition for that category, where there is rarely ever a clear winner.
I will be resuming some activity here, but I will likely miss a great deal of what is happening. Please feel free to get in touch if there's a story you think I should share.
The main new activity for this website will be a podcast. It's sort of like the times that I've written about music, but you'll get to hear my voice, and you'll be forced to listen to the music that I'm talking about rather than just going "oh wow, that sounds cool, I should listen to it sometime". No. You will listen to it now. But I understand that some people are in too much of a hurry to listen to a full podcast, so the scripts will be posted here as well. But you should listen to it as a podcast. The first episode is online now, you can check the blog page or check the mixcloud account, which will host the 10 most recent episodes (I am not paying for a full mixcloud account). All other episodes will be archived on this website.
Click here for older posts.
EOY Updates and My Solutions For Bad Lists
12/13/22
So I have a few more additions to the jumble list (2022 music blurbs presented in a randomized order every time the page loads). I've also created a grab bag that will give you a random selection of 10 albums I haven't written about just yet, since the pace of my writing is too slow but I still want to tell people about so many albums. It would be overwhelming to list the names all at once, I had a whole year to build a positive relationship with all this, nobody would have the time to repeat all of it on top of living their own life! So I think going 10 at a time is reasonable, there's a better chance for something to fit into a new life.
I think these randomizations are good innovations for the list format, but they're not enough. So I've developed a navigation tag system, using some idiosyncratic categories that I've assigned to the albums I've written about. I will probably define them at some point, but right now they are open to your own interpretations. If you click on one, it will take you to the next album with that tag. So if you only want the popular music that everybody likes, you'll just scroll around until you find a big one and then click on the "Widely Appreciated Music" tag, and then it'll take you to the next popular thing that I also like. I haven't written about any of the stuff that gets that tag yet, but there's categories like "Heady Dynamite", "Chug The Horn Of Plenty", and "The Austere Collection", among others. There's only 15 albums on the list so far, so it isn't really too significant to have this navigation feature, it's easy enough to read the whole thing straight thru. But eventually, there are going to be more words in this list than any one person would actually want to read. And so this will allow for a choose-your-own-adventure type of experience, where people can be actively engaged with forming the narrative, and play the list like it's a roguelike. I'm hopeful that this can lead to a greater capacity to get what you actually want from it.
This tag system also has the advantage of illustrating the connections that strengthen each album in my mind. I've been trying to come up with a term for an idea (temp title is "stacked listening" but I don't know if that is any good) about how I'm not *only* listening to the thing I'm listening to, I'm also listening to it through the previous experiences of other things that I've listened to. And these connections mean that listening to one of them can end up making the other one better. So this is a way of drawing out these stacks that I've formed in my head. Some of them might have no hope of ever making sense to someone else, but I still think there'll be value in showing them.
I'm curious to hear what people think about these approaches, it'll probably take me until at least July of next year to write about everything. So I'll be making little tweaks here and there, and maybe I'll even come up with some new twists. There's room for input! Also, since I'm going to be going slow with this, if anyone else wants to borrow from these ideas *at all*, please do! I'd love to see more intra-list connections and random orderings out there. If it's any help, you can even check the google sheets CMS I built for all of this, there's a lot of stuff in the formuals that is specific to my site, and also it's kind of a mess in general. It doesn't even put out all of the html. But I'd be happy to help make any adjustments if anyone actually wanted to use it themselves.
So here's the other new things I've added to the jumble, but for the full experience you should go to that link to check them out with the navigation tags!
I don't think you need to understand the ins and outs of just intonation to feel what this music has to offer. Which is a little self-serving, because I am not be able to explain how all this works on the technical side. But I find it so compelling. I've got a long history with Greg Davis' music, his Clouds as Edges 7" was an early favorite from back when I started to become more adventurously patient with my listening. The instruments on that recording were all Brita-filtered to their essence, which I found really helpful in priming me to hear a new kind of music, and to clarify Davis' intent within it. So I was psyched to see that this album would be working with sine waves, since that's about as unadorned as it gets. The activity is all happening within one larger whole rather than a more straightforwardly narrative sequence of distinct sound objects, but if you can get into that timescale, you can find so much on the inside. The increasing collisions between sines sometimes appear to slow everything down and highlights a moment's role in the sequence, like a projector error that shows the end and the beginning of the adjacent frames. The drift from clean harmonies to a rattling clash will happen so smoothly that the linear connection will be undeniable, but it still feels like it slipped in from an unperceivable dimension. There is a phenomenal physical world within these waves.
This is like Michael Bay without the sentimental parts, converted to sound. An incredible, unrelenting spectacle. Moments will pass that you may wish had been given more time to be developed, but the speed is more important than any of their potential futures. I have no idea how this kind of practice could be sustained, but in this moment, it is perfect.
mosaictheanimated - AREASCATTERBRAIN
You won't get much longer than two and a half minutes with the beats on this album, but they all make a great impression with the time they're given. Right off the bat you have 'placeholder' opening with a fake-out blast of sound before crashing the pitch down into the underwater zone, There's a really fun moment when that opening gets brought back for a second flash, but the slower motion moments have this dizzying quality from the way it develops, like there's the primary slow loop, but the right channel has these flashes of faster drums coming in at the end within the gaps, and the left channel mirrors this but in a blurrier and less defined manner. So it's all off-kilter, but then a higher frequency drone witth a uneven granular flutter to shuffle everything further. Those types of heady experiences are all over this album, but there's also the more straightforward moments like 'shOUT', which is by no means lacking in sonic character, but mostly seems focused on painting a nice melody over the rhythm. Just as noble a goal, rendered with the same level of care. It's all a great time!
Technically, this album came out in 2021 on Takuroku. But it's been expanded in this new edition, so I'll use that as an excuse to say that this phenomenal album is one of my favorites of 2022. On my first few listens, the form would only become clear for me well after it had already begun holding its shape. It was like I was staring at a landscape and only realized a dust devil had formed after it had torn up the place. When I experience that brand of hypnotism, combined with the sonic palette featuring odd strings, detritus, and field recordings across the fidelity spectrum, I'm reminded a little of all those bands in the early 00's playing in basements with at least one member hunched down on the floor over some odd assemblage of gear. I want to mentally file this album somewhere near the early Wooden Wand & The Vanishing Voice stuff, but with it's back turned to the parts where they break into discernable song. Rosso Polare stay committed to keeping it in nature, but their fingerprints are all over the wind. I think the track 'quattro_pioggia' is a great one to sample if you only have time for one piece. The way it introduces a dull bass throb and literally washes it away with recordings of rain that begin distorted and end up clear, gliding the momentum into the other sounds taking the lead, it's like an optical illusion where you're just as likely to see an image nature bending to the will of a human as you are the inverse.
Carl Stone - Wat Dong Moon Lek
I will never stop being impressed by the way that Carl Stone can strip away all semantic and causal sense from his source material in his plunderphonic mélange, until all that's left is the pure pleasure. If that was all he ever wanted to do, I'd be satisfied. But on this one, there's some substantial development. He's incorporating some tiny grain lengths, generating some noisy textures and warped resonance, flipping the samples like they're kitchen sponges and he's activating the abrasive side. The start of the album finds a familiar exuberance and weirds it into some amazing new heights with this technique, but then the second half zooms all the way in on an exploration of funhouse proportions. This is one of my favorite kinds of album structures, where it gives you the pop upfront, and then uses what's been introduced to take you into freakier zones. And I could not be happier to see Stone absolutely knock it out of the park with that format!
This is electronic music that's a step outside from "loosely tied together gestures", the kind of thing that eventually fashions a grid out of the best available twigs for the job. Everything within the music feels interconnected, but it's by a kite's string going from slack to taut. It's very flexible in the way it holds together, and this allows for the depiction of a solidification process. There's an excellent demonstration in the opener 'Vie', there's an introduction of a smattering of tones establishing a vocabulary of clanks and shimmers, some with amplitude flutters dropping or shooting upwards in speed, some playing with patterns contrasting stable frequencies against the equivalent of tv static. The shapes intially present themselves together, but everything is separating off from the shared root, the connections hold little bearing on the future of where the strands land. But then the music lands on a unifying drone, and all the booms, clicks and crackles start to snap into place, affirming all the expectations they set for each other. But I think my favorite is 'À lier', which pushes solidifcation from a much sturdier starting point, landing somewhere with hits like sheets of pavement. Quite satisfying, on so many levels!
Kristen Roos - Universal Synthesizer Interface Vol II
I was a introduced to the late 80's Apple computers as a child, so the old black and white interfaces trigger a certain nostalgic quiet glee. You can be certain that I was delighted when I saw the screenshots of the software used for this album. But there are no attempts in this music to recapture some lost feelings of youth, this seems more like it's about the underexplored capabilities of the software that are long since buried under the rapid pace of technological advancement. There is still some infatuation with the sonic character of the time in these tunes, but it never strikes me as gratuitous. I've always been the type to love these types of synth sounds for everything that they are, rather than substitutes for the physical instruments they often wind up reflecting, so this is good news to me. But even if you don't share that affinity, there's still so much to get from material like the propulsive minimalist accumulation of Diablo III. It's majestic, and credit goes as much to the peak as it does to the road. I think this old software was necessary to carve out this path, and Roos deserves major accolades for seeing that it was possible.
Fantasma do Cerrado - Mapeamento de Terras a Noroeste de São Paulo de Piratininga
These songs straddle the corporeal and immaterial worlds. The vocals are often reverberated to feel as though they perpetually come from the next room over, always just out of sight, no matter how much area the music runs through. The rest of the instruments suggest you could reach out and grab them, but then there'll be some kind of shift to disprove the notion. Like with the second track, it warms up with a long wash of tones before landing on earth with a cascade of delayed and overdubbed guitar, which becomes a singularly unfiied instrument once the first verse begins. The atmosphere evaporates in a sizzle, leading to a passage in which clashing delay patterns pull each individual element in different directions, it's all been smoke in the shape of something solid. Tremendous experiences like this are all over this album, some truly transportive music awaits you!
There was an album from Saskia back in 2019 on QTV Selo that was firmly planted in leftfield, I'd missed it at the time, but maybe you didn't? If you did, the more explicitly pop nature of this EP might be a shock. Fortunately, I had no such expectations, and was able to just get right into the excellent songwriting with no hesitation. There's certainly some oddly engaging choices, particularly with the tuba and rapid drum breakdown on 'Quarta Obra'. But I find the greatest delights with the more straightforward aspects, like the way the tiers of vocals develop upward in concert with the guitar on 'Quarta Rainha', it makes for such a beautiful ascent. I can't get enough, it's one of the songs I've come back to the most over the year. The rest of the EP has some really clever twists that I love, but this is the tune that hits me direct, every time.
Full disclosure, Jetski is a friend and I think he is hilarious on Twitter. So I might be a little biased here. But also, I've evangelized to many, many people on the brilliance of Wobbly - Wild Why and the twisted logic that emerges out of the onslaught of samples on that album. So this was always going to connect for me regardless of existing relationships, because Jetski is operating in a similar sphere. There's variety in the source material between each track, but it's never a jolt to jump between midwest emo, jazz, and metal. Because even when there are adjustments in the approach to best suit the material, there is a unifying sensation that I am witnessing a machine prove through its continued operation that it is not broken, in spite of how the output may come across. It simply has a new purpose. This is not a glitch, it's supposed to be happening, and it will all make sense if you let it.
It's the end of the year already!
10/10/22
Sorry I haven't been able to keep up with writing on this site so much this year. But that changes TODAY! I'm starting a page to collect my thoughts on all my favorites of this year. And the twist is that the order will be randomized, every time you load the page! Everybody always talks about how their lists are in no order, but it's actually in one order, every time. Not me though. I'm doing something about it.
I've only got 5 entries to start with, but I'll keep adding them through the year. You can go to What A Jumble! '22 for the full experience, but I'll also keep a running tally of what gets added with these blog posts (and the order they appear on this page will be random as well). Here's today's new entries:
- Lia Kohl - Too Small to be a Plain
An absolutely stellar solo debut from Kohl here, following her genuinely psychedelic collaborations with Macie Stewart and cello appearances on albums from women like Circuit des Yeux and Claire Rousay. This album involves a lot of layered improvisations, where the individual components were recorded with an indifference to all the other material in the music, where the meaning comes together in the multitrack assemblage. I actually have some experience with this kind of practice, except when I did it, I really wasn't confident in what I was doing, and I'd allow for most of the sound to congeal into a din that could hide all the unsatisfactory details. But nothing feels hidden in Kohl's music. Sounds may combine, but their individuality remains strong, as though they are embedded with a sense of purpose that has no trouble integrating with the community of sound. Everything feels as if it was meant to exist together, without the need for cheats. Some of it has an explanation, like the audio-to-midi mixtures on 'Join Me, Everybody'. But some of the ways that this music functions goes beyond any attribution, and it is simply glorious.
- Quentin Tolimieri - Monochromes
This one will trick you a little bit at the start if you're only glancing at it, you might think this is just some regular slow piano, something pretty that you don't have to worry about. But that's a lie. The second track will immediately clarify your situation, that each track is going to lock on to a specific part of the piano with the unbroken focus of a horror movie villain, and then drive away at what's in sight for anywhere between 5 and 35 minutes. Tolimieri's target for destruction appears to be the listener's unified perception of his instrument. It feels most obvious with material like the second track, it's non-stop rapid twinkling, and so it didn't take long for my mind to pull apart the hammer impacts from the string vibrations, and witness them elevate beyond their typically supportive role and become their own thing. But even on the slower tracks that read more melodically, I still get a sense of everything I'm hearing being pulled apart from itself. I'm particularly astounded by 'Monochrome 8', which sounds like what would happen if you asked a computer to do a complex fractal zoom on a timestretched piano note. There's some truly spectacular experiences to be had with this one.
- Zvrra - Solace
This is some very precisely tuned techno, though not the type that carries a sterile environment. It is dancing somewhere you can leave footprints. The music is full of long-drawn tones that get me leaning closer, and it pulls my ear toward the subtle melodics of all the pitched percussion, while new layers pile in and create new joints for the skeleton. I particularly love the mixture of the shimmering ascendent texture wash with the nervous mechanical rhythm on 'Redland Dunes'. And following that one with the interactions between the moody synth timbres and the bass hits on 'Grandis', it's an exquisite sequence, but the whole thing is all quite excellent!
- Vic Bang - Burung
I was having too much fun to even notice how weird this music was when I first heard it. It's not just that songs like "Lili" sound like computer-synthesized insect wing percussion with fake birds over top of it. You could put that style on some conventional music, no big deal. But what really sets it apart is the way the song moves between different bug sizes, it's a motion that could only be achieved with these specific instruments, providing the music with a depth that keeps me coming back.
- Matt Carlson - Bowling Alone
If the question is "what would it be like if music was weird and exciting", Matt Carlson always has some great answers. His 2016 album 'The View From Nowhere' is a high watermark in clinical freakouts, and recent work has seen him deliberately engage with new rules and fresh practices against stagnancy. He has often taken an approach to complex synthesis that keeps it all feeling hand-played. But there's so much more in reach now, so much more flexibility. A track like 'Apology to Satan' can wind up finding some kind of almost straightforward footing and then spend its runtime gleefully stumbling through it, but then 'Balding Dog' comes in with the utmost confidence, immediately appearing like its throwing out orbs to illuminate 4th dimensional intenstinesque hallways, discovering so many coiled paths within paths. It's quite a wonderful range!