John Gulino’s latest Doofgoblin release is an EP of micro-songs which has been quietly percolating on the shelf for some time. Clocking in at less than twenty minutes, this EP is a miniaturized galaxy of sounds that bubble, pop and zing like the frenzied movement of nanotech devices trying to fabricate an entire universe before their minuscule engines wear out. Album-RL has a frenetic, compressed feel to it as if Gulino has squashed down an hour of glitch dub music into a morsel that can be digested in a quarter of the time. There is a Squarepusher-esque bustle to the beats, but the energy has been subsumed into the microscopic array of a million electrical points. The motion of the beats isn’t something to follow with your head (and I’m impressed if you can), but rather it is something that washes over you like the passage of a thousand humming locusts.
“Sound amuses me,” Gulino says. “It makes me laugh. Nonrepresentational sound and sound association can be pure entertainment: comedy, tragedy, and terror, and often at once.” Listening to “Stanards Last Raze,” one gets the impression that you’re trapped in a doll house sized circus where the events under the tiny big top are unfolding at 16X. It’s a two minute thrill ride that encompasses the arrival of a hundred clowns and two hundred cream pies, bears on unicycles spinning plates and a thrilling high wire act that ends with a small dog leaping through a burning hoop.
“Bells and Allusions,” while the longest of the six tracks, un-spools like a high-speed summary of a lengthy Tibetan bell tone poem. Chimes ring and sound in compressed space, their resonances bumping against one another in their rush to sound. The percussion which wanders in at the half-way mark (as much as any sound on this record can actually “wander”) plays counterpoint to the bell melodies and, for a few minutes, there is space to breathe on this record. But events begin to wind up again as “Woodruff Solution” takes just one of these bell tones and mashes it into a fuzzed Atari kit drum beat. Gulino pushes his elements into a mass of noise and then explodes them like an atom smasher. We try to track individual electrons and protons, but we can only track the fading echo of their passage. The resulting implosion of sound into this vacuum brings the elements back together into a micro Big Bang.
The sound of the dishes being washed filters in to “Saturdum,” a fitting nod to Gulino’s “everything and the kitchen sink” approach to music making. He operates on a micro-level, manipulating tiny effects on an equally tiny scale. Somehow Doofgoblin manages to fit objects into the empty space of other objects, creating songs which are dizzying arrangements of helter-skelter ideas that play out like IDM for the Attention Deficit Disorder set.
Album-RL is OUT NOW on Unschooled Records.
