At its best, Blank Matter is still indebted to the musical legacy that spawned it. This is the eddy IDM has been for the last decade and will be in for the foreseeable future. But fortunately for Iuengliss, being indebted is not the same as being unimaginative, nor is it an artistic death sentence. Blank Matter has a surfeit of memorable tunes and satisfying drum programming, and there’s huge potential for Iuengliss to really take off and become more than just an enjoyable reflection of his influences.
[Release page] IDM is dead, which isn’t really news to anyone, but it’s hard to tell whether IDM musicians nowadays are soldiering on with full knowledge of this, hoping to distract long-time fans of the genre from their Aphex Twin records with intricate, rhythmic turns of phrase, or actually trying to resurrect something, “breathing new life” into an oft-ridiculed style. This isn’t so much of a difficult choice for aspiring IDM producers today as it is a rhetorical one – most of the time, people will assume you’re trying to do both. And either way, the viability of the album, artistic or commercial, is questionable. A cynic might raise that question in the first place, but a critic must consider it.
In light of this, there’s bad news for Iuengliss (pronounce eye-WIN-gliss, by the way): Loads of people will greet Blank Matter with apathy, which is understandable given the tedium of most IDM post-Drukqs. Or, others might assume the album is pretentious, if only by virtue of being compared to IDM, which, let’s be honest, isn’t a hard genre to make fun of. Someone more optimistic, though, might counter this derision or apathy with apathy of their own – who cares about Iuengliss’ influences? The guy’s earnest in his pursuit of his own ideals, and if those happen to align with those of IDM, does it really matter if the result is interesting?
Here’s the difficult part – Blank Matter is somewhere between those extremes. Meaning it’s a perfectly ambitious undertaking, executed competently, that inevitably wears its influences on its sleeve. It checks off all the correct boxes (not perfunctorily) and duly nods to other genres – big beat (sort of), electro, hip hop, all that. But at the end it’s an IDM album that delivers but doesn’t transcend.
But that’s probably asking too much from a “dead” genre. The argument I’ve been skirting around is the tired one about this all having been done before, which is a lazy way to dismiss an album. It’s also why I can’t bring myself to level it unqualified against Iuengliss, not to mention the fact that I can’t imagine anyone recording something like Blank Matter without full knowledge that someone would say that about their work.
Right, so… none of this is particularly groundbreaking. Who cares? the optimist says, and I find myself agreeing with him sometimes. Blank Matter is great for what it is, and the synaesthetic videos (think a reduced version of Alex Rutterford’s “Gantz Graf” video) that accompany every song make a favorable impression. “Magnetic Empires” crawls portentously on a quasi-dubstep beat, and so does “Malaysian Caning,” though the latter lets up on the brooding a bit. “AEFIresqd004” evokes Vim at his buoyant best, and “Blue Source” is a surprisingly uplifting song that can’t decide if it’s dubstep, hip hop, or electro – to wonderful effect. “Jungbeats” is a winner, just because I’m partial to drum and bass, and “Death Comes In Rays” eventuates in a devastating climax, pulling off fractured hip-hop with a melodic touch Autechre never had.
At its best, Blank Matter is still indebted to the musical legacy that spawned it. This is the eddy IDM has been for the last decade and will be in for the foreseeable future. But fortunately for Iuengliss, being indebted is not the same as being unimaginative, nor is it an artistic death sentence. Blank Matter has a surfeit of memorable tunes and satisfying drum programming, and there’s huge potential for Iuengliss to really take off and become more than just an enjoyable reflection of his influences.
Blank Matter is out now on Plastic Sound Supply. [Release page]
