(08.31.08) Brooklyn-based sound artist Erik Schoster is the man behind the quirkily dubbed He Can Jog – a playful scrambling of the letters in ‘John Cage.’ Appositely named in that Middlemarch is itself both quirky and playful in equal measure, mixed with moments of greater gravitas to form a sad-happy combo of sideways-on wistful pop instrumentalism and mercurial experimental electronica. Schoster’s stock-in-trade is the cut-and-paste splice’n’dice aesthetic, within which he creates collages with fractured harmonies, layered beats, and a gallimaufry of harps, acoustic guitars, bells and whistles (ok, hold the whistles).
Those of literary bent will have picked up on the symbolism of Middlemarch – a titular borrowing from George Eliot’s novel – emblematic of a theme of personal development through community interaction. Schoster evidently draws on his memories of past friends for the moments of emotional caché in a nostalgia-steeped excursion (he also deploys some of them as guest musicians). Right from the onset of opener, “Suite Part Four,” Schoster seeks to tailor a winsome laptopiary of error-driven tonalities and static-streaked backgrounds against which to project his melodic miniatures. Despite its episodic rhythms and heavy-duty digi re-dos (Max-ed out MSP), Middlemarch has about it an air of affectionate engagement.
Structurally, the album seems articulated around four so-called ‘Suites,’ the opening “…Part Four” and the concluding “…Parts One and Two” acting as bookends. The remainder are largely episodic sketches, ranging from the lull-a-tone melancholics of “Agnes (After Woodland Pattern),” to the nervous glitchery of “Pan-fried Fern,” to the toytown indietronica of “Contractors and Architects” – out of Morr Music via The Postal Service. This latter infelicity, along with one or two others, are indicative of critical faculties going AWOL; as, again, when software and cut-up fetishism are overindulged on “My (Mother’s) Records,” processed guitar, found sounds and vocal fragments sliced up into a glitch-cum-turntablist mash-up of little effect other than enervation. The short interludes “Dials,” with its minimal drone-like setting, and “A Small Thing,” with its play of static and melody are more likeable, as is the blithe and breezy refinement of “Suite Part Three,” a more solidly rhythmic composition bearing echoes of The Album Leaf or mid-period Four Tet.
The ludic playroom air of much of He Can Jog has a heady froth/frothy head. But it’s vitiated by a lack of ‘body’ registering increasingly at the album’s (lack of) centre. This seems to have set in until the album’s final musical act, a less mannered two-hander of harmonious glisten and shimmer spread over 12+ minutes. Digi-doodle tendencies reined in, He Can Jog here comes on like Keith Fullerton Whitman in a more expansive electro-acoustic drone-drift mode, “Suite Parts One and Two” being good enough to require an adjustment of egg idiom in final appraisal: Middlemarch – not a bad one, more like the curate’s… Good in parts.
Middlemarch is out now on Audiobulb. [Purchase
