The bio for Cyrusrex states that he’s already working on his second record, a record that threatens to utilize real instruments and coherent song writing. So what’s his first record all about? Is it just a wholesale agglutination of cast-off riffs and sonic squalor? Is it fifty-two minutes of some guy farting into a microphone and then applying custom DSP patches and echo delay to the sonorous flatulence? These are questions that confront me as I consider the enigma of Cyrusrex.
Raised on the hyperkinetic aesthetic of Otto Von Schirach, “Uncle Bob’s Foreskin” explodes out of the gate like a spasming centipede, legs flying in as many directions as physically possible. Beats and melodies are smashed up, smeared across a plate, and then centrifuged into a rainbow wash. “wibbble/Caps” hesitates for a few seconds, allowing us to catch up before it sprints off again, a haze of half-finished melodic ideas trailing in its wake. Cyrusrex has been working in the audio community of Los Angeles for the last ten years, collaborating behind the scenes with a number of experimental performers and
allOfme.hyde is the explosive decompression of a decade’s worth of partially formed ideas and melodies.
Schizophrenic and chaotic, allOfme.hyde turns out to be fairly listenable. Cyrusrex’s approach to spattering beats and layering fragmented melodies isn’t as completely free-form as Shirach’s work nor is Cyrusrex completely hell-bent for speed like Venetian Snares’ motion-blur breakcore. “annoy.ants” settles into a rollicking groove, driven by a persistent pulse over which Cyrusrex layers eight hundred different elements, using and discarding software patches like he’s got to use every one of them before the end of the song. “jiggleWisket” is almost delicate, a rounded melody floating over a bed of sizzling DSP breakbeats. It’s a ballad for a digitized avatar of a three-headed goat, a song flush with a binary meshwork of interwoven code shards.
The latter half of the record is taken up with remixes and collaborative efforts, including contributions from Venetian Snares and cEvin Key as well as other members of the Negative3 family. Aaron Funk (who breaks beats on an atomic level as Vennetia Snares) chops up “Uncle Bob’s Foreskin” more than Cyrusrex has already done, perpetrating a double layer of smackbeat insanity. cEvin Key’s mix of “wibble/Caps” slows proceedings down just enough that the scattered melodies have an opportunity to find one another, bringing “wibble/Caps” into a realm that is nearly laconic in its pacing. Of the remix/review section of allOfme.hyde, “MOS (anon’s taming the beast mix)” is the standout track. The breakbeats are broken down into tiny shards of static pop and the nearly organic sounding melodies are allowed to unwind in the now deserted playing field. It’s a Stefan Betke vision of Cyrusrex’s frenzied world and is deliciously paced.
allOfme.hyde is a technically impressive but spastic debut, a thick and splintered collection of damaged melodies and boiling breakbeats. Cyrusex doesn’t give us much opportunity to seek out the human core of the machine behind the machinery and, as such, allOfme.hyde is a cold and calculated record. Now that he’s got all of his ideas out, let’s hope he can expand on them a bit more for the next record.
allOfme.hyde is OUT April 27th on Negative3.
