Datashock - Pyramiden Von Gießen

Retro Kosmische seems to hold a validity like few other genre rehashes.  Perhaps it's that the boundaries of the genre were initially not defined, or maybe the lack of contemporary attention that caused it to reach receptive ears years too late, but in any case, there's still a rather fertile response to further explorations.  Datashock have managed a particularly arresting take on the whole tension/release thing, as well as their ability to integrate that seemlessly into a music simultaneously reverential (towards its Krautrock ancestry) and innovative.

Krautrock as a term exists because not all of the ethereal, experimental rock sounds created in Germany evoke spaciness (covered by the Deutsch-preferred handle "Kosmische" or Cosmic Rock, which has more to do with  the Hawkwind & Amon Düül variety of things).  There's something in Can's rhythmic restlessness that suggests more of a microcosm than a macrocosm--a Fantastic Voyage through the central nervous system, with Damo Suzuki's unintelligible streams of consciousness as the sound of our own brain murmurs.  There is little of the straight-ahead ascent that the spacier music of NEU! and Guru Guru evokes, and none of the ethereality of Popol Vuh or Tangerine Dream.  This makes it harder to classify every experimental/rock release from this period under that banner, hence the catch-all "Krautrock".

A series of monoliths--riffs climbing towards the horizon, wordless vocals.  Piles of warm synths, fizzing guitars, and gently undulating drums.  Makes for an enjoyable listen, despite adding little to some already well-trodden territory.  Third track "Chiahonania Leder Boots" has some excellent ululating slide guitar, sounding like a Träd, Gräs Och Stenar outtake.  There's a good amount of variety here, from the strains of Ash Ra Tempel echoed throughout opener "Lasagne Phalanx", or the pastoral music box that segues into an ecstacy of Can-like rhythmic shouting and middle eastern undercurrent on the title track.  Things lose a little focus at the end, but in a fitting way: the various timbres and moods of the album are revisited and given their say once again, finally drifting off, like the pleasant, dreamless sleep that follows a particularly vivid hallucinogen binge.

Were this not such a pleasant listen on its own, suggesting little in the way of standard '70s "Space Rock", it would be tempting to recommend as a good introduction to the genre.  It's more a mashup of various exotic European forms of avant-motorik, these guys are obviously well-versed in the NWW List.  However, despite the sitar-ish slide guitar, and rockin' beats, this album manages a more becalmed take on things--without leaving the listener stranded in directionless atmosphere.  Each piece is an engaging whole, with interplay that suggests improvisation, but a compositional clarity giving direction.  There's a fullness of sound here that I have heard on few recent releases, a marriage of the grimy richness of analog and glitchy clarity of digital, yet in the service of something greater than just a good mix--in fact, very few moments reveal themselves as purely digital, enhancing it with a slightly-dated quality.  There are times when I feel the speakers shaking the room, and then I realize the album was over twenty minutes ago, and I've become ultra-attuned to my environment through it's hyper-detailed ambience.

Perhaps the main reason Krautrock is so resistant to exploitation is its nebulous nature.  There's no real defining characteristic to the genre other than its time and place of origin, although it has come to symbolize a catch-all term for that straddles the lines of kitschily mind-melting (psychedelic) and futuristically technology-based (post-rock).  Like post-rock and post-punk, it's more defined by the attitude that inspired the work than the characteristics of the work itself.  As a result, it's influence has had a similarly chameleonic effect: combined with reggae and punk, it provided the main thrust for post-punk, then was stripped of as many cultural signposts as possible and combined with hip-hop and ambient music to create post-rock.  Ultimately, it's provided a template for how we interact with "genres" today: Cold Wave?  Dance Punk?  New Weird America?  What do these names signify, beyond the aesthetic expected of the participants?  It seems that right now, even the most daring of new genres design themselves to only appeal to listeners predetermined towards liking it.  The new aestheticism is like the late '70s development of Album-Oriented Rock, structured to ensure maximum exposure at minimum cost through the pursuit of "accessibility" (i.e. appealing to the ever-present lowest-common-denominator).

Of course, this has its pros and cons.  Most people need exposure to culture they wouldn't normally encounter (let's call it "exotic"), for entertainment, if not growth.  As an overwhelmingly voyeuristic society, we enjoy observation without interaction, which encourages an increasingly cynical worldview (cynical in this case meaning the opposite of empiric: judging without experiencing).  While this ultimately makes interaction safer, it also prevents social change.  We are constantly told that technological change drives social evolution (i.e. "Social Networking", which is really nothing of the kind), but personally, I see the opposite.  People have become atomized, separated from each other in their comfort zones.  Everything about this style of life speaks of a desperation to avoid meaning.  I personally have no problem with that, just with the process through which this is reached: gradual replacement of signifiers.  Yes, it's become obvious that every commercial enterprise is a crass cash-in, but at this point anything touted as NOT a crass cash-in is immediately assumed to be so, even when the buying public knows the difference well.  It's in everyone's best interest to buy into whatever fad is at hand, allowing a mass distraction from whatever unpleasantness goes on.  Every "great" society has had this, from the Roman Colisseum to the Salem Witch Trials.  No news there, right?

So once we're done with distractions, what's left to do?  Improve things?  Uh, not really.  Unless we're talking about the first-person, in which case improvement is relative.  I personally see it in music like this: Datashock are in no way a commercially viable enterprise (despite their affiliations with Julian Cope and his stable of all things psych-rock), nor are they likely to become critical darlings (despite this article's appearance to the contrary), nor are they cult innovators who will be appreciated long after their time.  They are silt-sifters: mad old claim-jumpers panning the rivers for gold when most are sunbathing or plotting their climb to the top.  Datashock are living in the present, and I would not be surprised if they only existed within the confines of their recordings & live events, then taking a bow and disappearing into the very ether they mine.

Even the song titles hint at prog-gone-by: Gong, Amon Düül, Heldon, Parson Sound. While there's an undeniable retro-fetishism about this collective, it leaves one with a feeling that the past they reference is still more futuristic than most of the modern music being produced. Their music carries a wonderful chunkiness to it, Like Oneida digging a hole to the center of the Earth. While previous efforts by this collective have felt a little uninspired or clunky at times, this album manages to walk a fine balance between yesterday and tomorrow, ending up sounding like a better-than-average today.

Manic Street Preachers - The Holy Bible

The Manic Street Preachers are mostly known in the USA for their punky/poppy side, seen as Clash/Cure/Guns N' Roses acolytes who managed to write some catchy songs and posture themselves as meaningful political commentators without having much original to say.  "The Holy Bible" takes that image and replaces it with socially-savvy, experimental detours to life's darker side.  A true pity it was never officially released in America, as a little promotion could have made this the natural successor to Nirvana's "In Utero".


Of the 13 songs on this album, at least seven are immediate classics, and the other six are no slouches.  "Archives of Pain", "4st 7lb", and "Mausoleum" are particularly impressive, and the album-ending pair of "The Intense Humming of Evil" and "P.C.P" truly take the noise to another level--the former is an industrial-grade stretched out crawl, and the latter is one of the most perfect three-minute blasts of melody and attitude that the 90s offered up.  The only reason this falls short of a full 5 stars is that a couple of the songs throughout are less than total perfection, but don't take that as an indication that any part of this album is unlistenable.  That said, the rest of the Manics' catalog is pretty inconsequential when compared to this.

The lyrics are truly disturbing throughout (especially "4st 7lb", probably the most visceral and uncomfortable song ever written about eating disorders), and not just because the band's primary lyricist, Richey Edward James, disappeared shortly after its release.  This ranks highly among other examples of seemingly-hopeless, borderline nihilist music, and that's all the more impressive an accomplishment considering that the Manics' have not really cultivated an aura of disturbedness throughout their career.  James was consistently candid about his substance abuse or self-abuse without putting himself on a pedestal or glorifying his behavior.  This attitude helps increase the album's tension between darkness and light: the consistent accessibility of the material and harshness of the production reflects the disparity between the despair of the lyrics and hopefulness of their delivery.

All in all, this album stands up well almost twenty years after its initial recording, and sounds as relevant now as it did upon release.  A true classic of the "post-grunge" era.

Simply Saucer - Half Human, Half Live

Why do bands reunite only to piss all over their reputations? Bands that can do it sans vomit are few and far between (no sense giving examples, there's always the chance that ten years from now they'll be just as disgraceful as the rest). Simply Saucer seemed to be one of those bands from the proto-punk era never meant for wider consumption or longevity. Their sole album Cyborgs Revisited--initially released over ten years after the band had disintegrated--managed to capture a unique brand of howling post-prog with the distortion turned way up and a penchant for convoluted poppiness a la Syd Barrett. All the band's best recordings come from the Cle-punk no-man's-land era when the Electric Eels and Rocket From the Tombs were labouring in obscurity. A time that held a lot of promise, but isn't easily revisited or recaptured. Unfortunately, on this release that's just what Simply Saucer attempts to do. And fails. Jeepers, do they ever fail!

It would be silly to think that they'd pick up where they left off thirty years ago, but one would expect a certain forward-thinking attitude, right? I mean there are parts of Cyborgs Revisited that people still haven't caught up to--portions of "Illegal Bodies", for example, where the guitar just iiiiiiinches into cacophony. That's some Stacy Sutherland shit from the Deep South, only in East Coast VU territory. So of course I was pretty excited to see that there's a version of that on the live portion of this new disc (yes, half studio half live--that's what the title's punning on, and puns are always a bad sign). Unfortunately, every other track on the album is some sort of sub-"We're Gonna Have a Real Good Time Together" boogie-thrust (with the exception of the excellent-but-slight version of "Mole Machine" and the uninspired take on "Low Profile", the original demo of which was profoundly uninspired sounding in the first place). And the "Illegal Bodies" cover isn't even worth the price of admission, sadly. It's too on track, no sense of chaos threatens, and we're never given the satisfaction of hearing them burn the shit down. In fact, there's a middle portion where they all do coordinated slams, and it sounds perfectly contrived. The rest of the album is exhortations along the lines of "Now's the Time For the Party", the lyrics of which concern, well, partying. There are several more songs along those lines: "Almost Ready Betty" and "Get My Thrills" both sound so uninspired that anyone who actually feels like having a good time after hearing them should have their pulse check.

Ok, ok, ok. I should have seen this coming, as the expanded version of Cyborgs Revisited shows that the band had long lost their innovative origins by the time of their sole contemporary release: the "I Can Change My Mind"/"She's A Dog" 7" from 1978. Along those lines, the post-album demos for songs like "Low Profile" and "Bullet Proof Nothing" have a certain degree of charm, but are entirely lacking in rawness and daring. However, considering that these recordings have been available for over ten years, and the critical concensus remains that they are dogshit, one would expect bandleader Edgar Breau to have revived a somewhat more savage version of his more greatly appreciated era. I suppose that back in the day these concessions made Simply Saucer a compelling live band--just a little more daring than their Ontario contemporaries like Teenage Head, but still tuneful. In retrospect, it seems obvious that once synth-operator Ping Romany had left the band, the blips and bleeps were not the only things jettisoned, but all the curvaceous song structures as well.

This release stands as an all-too-frequent reminder of the fact that bands can almost never recapture the initial energy that made them viable in the first place. Now, I'm not saying it isn't worth trying, because when things work out, it's usually pretty worthwhile. However, even at it's most high-minded, a reunion can't be much more than an attempt to cash in--whether fiscally or just on some respect now that the rest of the world has caught up. But once the world catches up, going from "ahead of the curve" to "greatest hits and saggy beer guts" is no glorious end. And ultimately that's why a product like this album is so completely unnecessary: it's a permanent reminder that recapturing any period from a bygone era just leaves you cold and unsatisfied. And wanting to listen to the first half of Cyborgs Revisited, pretending the reunion never happened.

Battles - Gloss Drop

I won't even bother discussing the music. Anyone with passing recognition of the name Battles knows the story: the "super-group" of Tyondai Braxton, Ian Williams, Dave Konopka, and John Stanier arose playing instrumental super-jams bridging the gap between dance and rock, analog chops and digital trompe l'oeil. After 3 EPs of somewhat-interesting high-intensity post-rock, they hunkered down and released the stellar Mirrored in 2007--a breakthrough featuring the band's first vocal forays (courtesy of Tyondai), and songs that pushed musical boundaries while not sacrificing accessibility one iota. Several tours followed, and then they began work on the follow-up, impeded by Tyondai quitting at some point. Much speculation has attended the release of this new album, and how it would be affected by the departure of the band's most readily indentifiable member. Well, the results are no surprise: the EP jams are back, but with obnoxious vocals lacking all the individuality Tyondai had injected. Battles have gone from sounding futuristic and fun with a hint of dangerous edginess to sounding like Ponytail, while behaving like the Disco Biscuits. While their previously workmanlike attitude added to the more-than-the-sum-of-its-crazy-parts feeling, their recent Jimmy Fallon performance revealed three men obviously thinking "we are the shit!" while performing the Gang Gang Dance out-take circa 2005 that is "Futura". Williams mugged for the crowd and ecstatically played two keyboards--without even looking at them! Konopka wiggled his ass and grimaced like he was backing up Edwyn Collins, and John Stanier--long the band's rock-solid eye of the hurricane--bopped his head in time to the absurdly funky beat.

Listening to Gloss Drop at a 2011 Fourth of July party, the mood really suffered. After a while, the conversation drifted to the simpering electro-pop issuing from the speakers, and it wasn't good. "It sounds like a really boring carnival", remarked one. I couldn't agree more, it sounds like people doing what's expected of them in loud technicolor. This is the aural equivalent of a bad round of golf, complete with the ridiculous outfits.

Ok, I said I wasn't gonna talk about the music, and I did, so let's leave it at this: this album is depressing, and for possibly the only reason that these douchebags couldn't assess the problem of a follow-up to Mirrored without going for the obvious cash-in. Why am I surprised? I guess because Braxton really had the least to gain from going solo, but seemed to recognize the impossibility of a sequel. I can't really blame the other three--especially considering that none of them have had their taste of spotlight--but it's tempting to do so, if only for the reason that they seem so eager to take advantage of a chance to dilute their former achievements (plus who can imagine them doing justice to anything off Mirrored now?). For a band that has derived most if it's repuation from strange combinations of man and technology, seeing them on Fallon said it all: the strangest thing at this dance party is probably Ian Williams' windbreaker.

Zombi - Escape Velocity

(Tell You) About Phaedra

Why Sequencers Only Work in Italian Horror
-- OR --
Edgar Froese, Go Home!

Looking back, Tangerine Dream never fulfilled the promise of their first four albums, not that they needed to. From Electronic Meditation on through Atem, TD insinuated more and more shuddering ferocity into their music, while removing anything remotely resembling melody, harmony, and repetition. Then, they blew it all with Phaedra, a sequencer-driven jelly-filled-sock of an album that managed to sound like a total inversion of their most successful formula. In terms of scope, they went from sounds emulating cosmic birth and death to soundtracks for bad underwater chase scenes.

I really enjoyed Zombi's 2005 full-length Surface to Air, though perhaps not as much as Claudio Simonetti's soundtrack work to which the band pays homage. Zombi are yet another band adding little to an already well-defined genre, but doing what they do well, and filling a niche that is seemingly left open for their target audience. They take distinctly 70s-sounding synths (usually a couple of the pad/fake string variety, then a couple bass tones, and lastly some goofy sequencer to reinforce the beat), add some drums, and let things fester for 5-10 minutes. The outcome is a specific type of prog rehash, the kind best accompanied by old movie visuals or underwater documentary footage. To distill their attitude down to a word: menace.

That's why Escape Velocity leaves me completely cold: there's nothing here even VAGUELY menacing. It comes off as more of a poor Phaedra imitation than anything else, attempting to streamline the band's sound, but really just detracting. Instead of leaving behind the necessities, they've scraped the palette clean and removed all of the shadowy territory that made the earlier work more convincing (though that's still not saying much). In doing this, they've managed to create the aural equivalent of a dull grey that believes itself deepest black and cavorts most inappropriately.

Sadly, the coolest thing about this album is the cover, which--while eye-catching--really says it all. Instead of the glacial grandeur of Surface to Air, or the obvious-yet-still-classy cover for 2009's Spirit Animal, which both embodied a similar epic scope musically (and instilled a similar anxiety and awe), we get a picture of a naked woman running off a pier into oblivion with a bat-winged DeLorean in the foreground: this is Chillwave territory. So instead of more haunting traipses through soundtracks for nonexistent horror films, we're given a suburbia with an inappropriate intensity. These guys need to listen to some Rangers, and get their heads straight.

On tracks like "DE3", the techno vibe is definitely present, but more due to the up-tempo pounding bass drum than any change in instrumentation. Inspiration-wise, we're in Demons 2 territory, as opposed to the usual Deep Red territory, or the classic Lucio Fulci film from which the band derive their name.

Honestly, I'm pretty bored by this release, and probably won't play it more than two or three times before forgetting about it. In the past, even when I've found Zombi's work profoundly uninspired, it's at least provided a good soundtrack (usually for "House of the Dead"-style video games). This album, however, only has one track that I can even marginally get into: the closing "Time of Troubles", which sounds like it would not be completely out of place on a Puerto Rico Flowers album. Over a dolorous beat--the slowest on the album--band members A.E. Paterra and Steve Moore layer moody synths that hint more at gothy atmosphere a la Closer than Goblin, although the overall effect is more depressed than doomy, more bored than suspenseful.  Which really says it all: at its most engaging, this album is inoffensive, and at its worst, pointlessly unendurable.  I guess that makes it a pretty successful evocation of their namesake after all, then.

Dope Body - Nupping

In honor of Dope Body's new album Natural History being released tomorrow, I thought I'd re-post this quickie review I wrote last year of their first album, Nupping.

I generally describe Dope Body to my friends as a three-way collision between Rage Against the Machine, Battles, and dub.  That really does this band a disservice, as they sound like much, much more.  Baltimore tends to yield odd genre-combo bands that take a trash compactor to seemingly random modes of expression, then paint the whole thing day-glo.  Dan Deacon, Celebration, and Beach House are the most obvious examples, though Beach House has definitely toned the fluorescence down.  The main point, though, is that Baltimore's exports tend to not RAWK.  Sure, there are plenty of examples that do just that and do it very well (Oxes, Double Dagger, Thank You, Vincent Black Shadow), but they have not managed to light up the blogs in the same way.  Enter Dope Body.

Every song on this album screams "WE WANT TO EAT OTHER BANDS", and for good reason.  Dope Body run through different ideas and styles of music with an enthusiasm and attention-deficit greater than even the most highly-caffeinated twelve-year-old.  There are remnants of prog, metal, rap-rock, grunge, ambience, and even a few shoe-gazes, plus a few things I haven't heard anywhere else.  And it all works.  The video for album-opening single "Enemy Outta Me" was released a full year before the album, and those who saw the video too early slowly drowned in a sea of salivation waiting for its release.  We've been well-rewarded for our wait.  Bands with this much energy and a slash-and-burn aesthetic aren't supposed to write great songs, so why is the jumble of mumbles, hisses, and screeches that makes up most of this album HUMMABLE???  By the time the first track is done (all three minutes of it), we've gone through several distinct sections of fuzzy plug-n-play meandering, blitzkreig stop-start noise-rock, delay pedal looping, stuttering white skank, and post-industrial meltdown.  All done in a highly engaging, visceral manner.  The rest of the songs don't really let up, making for a full-on sprint of an album that really satisfies.

I need a few days to digest the new one, but judging from my initial impressions, I'll be posting about that soon enough--and if that review doesn't seethe and foam as much as this one did, it's only because Nupping is one tough act to follow.

Peterlicker - Nicht

This release is for those (like me) who enjoy their ambience closer to psychedelic-doom-trash than metal-punk-orgasm, if you will: perpetual disintegration. I'm a lazy man: keep the terrain changing so I don't have to change it myself, please. An undifferentiated wall of hiss is just NOT the point, in my opinion. Power Electronics can do that all it likes, there's only so far that the reduction of complexity can take you. Almost everything in this world is more than the sum of its parts, so why say that endless repeats of Second Annual Report done less imaginatively don't provide diminishing returns? Of course, the messenger is always more readily perceived than the message, so in many cases those diminishing returns become necessary. Look at any "major musical event" (whatever THAT might mean) from the last 100 years--someone's still trying to make that revelant, to re-live that importance in the first-person. Whether it's swing, rockabilly, or Nirvana, most creators of music start out believing that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, when it fact it's the laziest. If it isn't completely obvious to everyone already, I'll state my feelings: influence, NOT imitation, is the most polite, inteulligent, and above all interesting way to show kudos. Learning that your favorite band loves the new Hot Chip album usually means that they're going to be skewing their next album towards some vein of lush electro-glitch-core (e.g. David Byrne talking about Jamees Blake in his semi-recent interviews). However, when someone(s) can talk knowledgably about music they love that has had no impact on the music they make, it is usually an indication of egolessness.

I would rather see a million inept attempts to reach something new and wholly original than a dozen well-crafted refinements of existing principles. Even the most experimental genres, labels, composers, etc. have throwbacks--that's not the problem. I suppose what I'm ultimately trying to get at here is the idea that people's needs have changed, so now music must be a throwback in order for most listeners to hear it as more than DATA. This is something we all deal with on a daily level, to the extent that consciousness becomes the dividing factor. What makes our ears stand up has always determined to which ideas we are receptive, which usually keeps our interaction with art to a superficial minimum. "Give me content I'm sure to enjoy, and the form does not matter," is generally what the masses demand--despite the commercial assumption that form dictates content (i.e. radio), which has proven to be correct only to a very limited degree.

I'm no different from these nameless listeners I describe, which is why Nicht really hits the spot. Or a spot, I can't really say I know which one it hits. It comes in the trappings of darkness, more an alliance with industrial noise than ambient drone, but sonically it's really in the middle. The darkness comes mostly from the vocal element, not the instrumentation--although there is an undercurrent of anxiety that would make this hard to term ambient. Calm anxiety? Sort of, more like that feeling when you know something inevitable is forthcoming, but you've accepted your own relation to the event, and the time to bide until it comes. Most of the value inherent in this music (at least to me) is it's ability to depict or reflect conflict without any coloration. I mean, isn't it time for music to make more than just declaritive statements of intent? I don't know about anyone else, but I spend the majority of my time too confused to know exactly WHAT I'm thinking or feeling, I just know that not having a dependable moral or emotional compass is generally upsetting. And since doubt does not exactly inspire ecstacy, it seems that modern life steps further away from that door every day. Ignorance may have used to equal bliss, but these days it just means you're clueless.

The age of the composer, of the singer-songwriter, has not passed, but it is passing.

Movies vs. paintings/photos=current digitization of music past commodity vs. previous humanism. Current music amounts to the closest humans can interact with technology (unless it's busking on street corners, in which case it's generally lame), expectations have risen accordingly. Presently music is more an expression of technical competency in expressing relatable emotion, than any sort of emotional depth in and of itself. Throwing out frames of reference for "sad" or "angry" rather than expressing those feelings in a way that better underlines their complexities. The problem at the heart of the issue is that people are rarely creative out of a pure inner need--that need becomes tainted by ideas of fame or acceptance, and so rather than expressing any true feeling and taking a RISK of being misunderstood, it's far more rewarding to use preexisting modes of communication, even if they are very limited.

I know nothing about Peterlicker, so none of this necessarily applies, I had to get up on my soapbox. Every little bit of info about these guys (and there doesn't seem to be much) puts their aesthetic as some sort of ultimate doom-laden apocalypse refinement. And maybe this says more about my imagination than my musical tastes, but this sounds to me like much more than an apocalypse. It sounds like galactic expansion and contraction. Suns burn out, only to have space evaporate and compact itself. The floor is thirty feet below your dangling legs, then you are swimming in it like molasses, up to your elbows. It's big, but not to the point of insubstantiality, right? Because sometimes something can be so big that it just becomes another microcosm--just so much wasted effort. Compare early Tangerine Dream to 80s movie-soundtrack Tangerine Dream, for example. There's a comfortable size to the five tracks on this album, like being stranded in a station after the last train has left for the night, knowing that you didn't really want to go anywhere anyway. Rather than the typical musical journey, this album provides a large space to explore at the listener's leisure. The dubbed-out mix allows maximum space for sound to play, and meaning isn't imposed.

................Creeping, zittering synths and slurrrrrrred vocals, pitch-shifting, sounds of abrasion. Processing on top of processing. So many shades of grey that it becomes technicolor. No shattering of senses, this melts and melds--not destruction, but creation through deformity..............................

.................Moments of shimmering ambience, creaking, yattering, rumbling, crashing, background detritus so overwhelmed by sound that its origin becomes unimportant, just another set of elements within the scintillating psychedelic wash......................

Notes shouldn't be clean, like the rest of music. Mixed Fidelity infects everything we now listen to, from the dirty/sparkly accessible pop on the radio to the most experimental. Why would a note start or end the same way each time? Why does a riff bear repeating? These are not questions anyone should be interested in answering definitively, they continue to inform every piece of music. Notes should slide, collide, become dissonant and assonant, yet for some reason cleanliness is prized. Thankfully not here. The listener is thrown down a dark tunnel, with few textural reference points, only a sense of gravity. The gravity provides the grace. It may seem directionless, but only when atomized. If taken as a whole, there is more than enough differentiation to allow for gleanings beyond the initial. They removed the repetition so you could replace it, through repeated listens during which you don't need to pay attention anyway. If you already know what's there, then why confirm it through acknowledgment? The only end result that matters is gained understanding, revelatory or otherwise. Art that hits the pleasure center without informing is the worst sort of friend, and this cautions like little else. It is a WARNING, here to keep you away from anything of less value.