Invisible Soundtracks is a darker foray, its cerebral electronic qualities are balanced against chiseled, arcane, and bleak blips’n bleeps.
This week saw the release news of Aphex Twin’s Collapse EP coming in September on Warp, and without a doubt, RD-James continues to baffle the brain with vivid, complex, and confounding audio structures. On the flip side, but with a similar trajectory, Cathode Ray Tube (aka Portland, Maine’s Charles Terhune) has orchestrated fractured sound bytes for almost 20-yrs and continues to exhibit a sonic maturation with each release.
Trying to stay non-biased as we’ve covered several CRT titles over the years, Invisible Soundtracks is a darker foray, its cerebral electronic qualities are balanced against chiseled, arcane, and bleak blips’n bleeps. “The Sleep Market” dips into hypnotic, staccato beats and disjointed rhythm bursts as “DEIMOS” maneuvers through almost 9-minutes of extraterrestrial bliss—the lively drums, looping melody, and swirling dark-industrial tones and drones keep this track alive. “Quantitative Doom” feels like a distant cousin to “DEIMOS,” its mood skitters about the landscape scraping up loose mechanical debris along the way. And this is where Invisible Soundtracks excels—the level of high-tech execution on this album is a welcomed distraction from the exciting IDM news trail this week.
All manner of crunchy post-industrial mayhem is unearthed (ref. “Phobos” and “Alpha Omega Transect”) where noise, electrical slabs, darkness, and distortion are stretched to the limit. Where the exploratory backbone of “O Broken World” expands with many possible meanings, there’s a raw energy buried within this piece that wants to explode but is tempered by its modular, jittery effects.
As most of us (myself included) struggle at the checkout line of Bleep.com with a basket of AFX goodies, why not head over to the M-Tronic Bandcamp page and donate a few dollars towards Invisible Soundtracks? You won’t be disappointed.
Invisible Soundtracks is available on M-Tronic.
