(12.31.07) Boltfish is becoming one of those labels that put out albums like you or I
have hot dinners. Now if you’re partial to a decent dinner, and at all
discerning about your food intake, you won’t be content with re-heating
someone else’s warmed up leftovers filched from the communal fridge. Sure,
you might feel inclined to pinch a flatmate’s recipe, even some of his/her
ingredients to concoct your own version of a signature dish of theirs
you’ve coveted, but you’d want to tweak it your way a bit. At the very
least, even if you had it cooked for you, you’d want to add some seasonings
or a special sauce to customise it. So, just as in life ‘man ist was man
isst’ (You are what you eat – as the man Goethe pithily quoth) so in the
contemporary electronic arts, you are, to a significant extent, what you
tweak. To Be may have once been To Do (brought to you courtesy of J-P.S.
Existentialism Inc.) but these days tweaking someone else’s Doings can be
enough to give a guy some Being. Otherwise you could end up anybody, which
is almost as bad as being nobody. Which combination of reflection on Art’s
auteur/authenticity conundrum and pomo-babble brings us to ENV(itre) and
whether his okoy is okay or so-so.
Now, as a child it seems Pole Miroslaw Majewski was fascinated by the 8-bit
sounds of the Atari and C64, which led to his induction into the world of
electronic music and the start of his own music production. Biog notes
further inform us that “since then he has worked continuously on improving
the knowledge and skills required to produce his distinctive sound, a
development which he says is far from being complete.” Now that last clause
in the sentence stands as an almost poignant unknowingly eloquent sidenote
to okoy. Why?
Well, while ENV(itre) has appeared on compilations on respected labels such
as Neo Ouija and Databloem and Hydrogen Dukebox, remixing Metamatics and
being remixed in turn by Lackluster, this collection betrays Majewski’s
insufficiencies as a frontline practitioner in the crowded kitchen of
bedroom-beat geek-pop-tronica. No, it’s not so much its maker’s fixation
with the likes of Warp, Rephlex, AI, Planet mu, Toytronic (hereinafter
referred to as WRAPT), for, truth be told, he is not alone among the ranks
of Boltfishers in being so in thrall. Well, it is that to an extent, but…
the main point is that, unlike other artists with releases on Boltfish
drawing on this post-electro post-ambient post-techno motion pool (cf.
recent Boltfish works by ElectricWest and Btb, which provide idiosyncratic
refreshes and personalised updates), it’s a lack of creativity and
imagination in how to recombine and reformulate existing resources that
exposes ENV(itre) as a virtual copyist, or at best a mere workmanlike
plodder – a replicator, a WRAPT fanboy whose fandom feels need for
expression through a kind of passive engagement (as opposed to an active
consumption).
So, what you get with okoy is is the usual parade of sad and dreamy melodic
electronica and post-everything gestural beats – the ones that go
tippy-tappy and skitter-skatter, but fail to matter, since they give the
listener not so much the groinal-neural interconnect achieved by the best
of ahem… Intelligent Dance Music (there, it’s out, undressed!) as a kind
of bloodless sub-cerebral frottage. And let’s face it, this year has been
one in which most IDM material has had all the vital tongue-bursting savour
of last month’s chewing gum left on the bedpost. Yet the likes of Hecq (see
0000 (Hymen)), Anders Ilar (see Ludwijka Extended (Shitkatapult)), and
Proem (from whose Socially Inept period ENV(itre) has lifted much,
filleting out in the process the rhythmic-timbral guts that distinguished
that project) have shown that there is still life in the old dog,
re-tooling The Then for The Now, making it less Has-been. But as long as
ENV(itre) remains enmired in regurgitations of 90s ambient-techno and
post-industrial electro-pop paradigms, his work will remain as un-compelling
as it is irrelevant.
okoy is out now on Boltfish.
