Digitalis don, Brad Rose, now offers the Norwegian sound-dabbler an outlet for further quirky collage and slippery soundscape fare with latest, Mood Chaser, which again leans toward a stylistically wandering gait—a set of hallucinogenic synthesis dissolved in woozy lo-fi ambient solution with liquid pulse and sundry electronic detritus.
Benjamin Finger claims he has ‘by accident been composing music with a healthy disregard for genres.’ (google+ page). A bit like his music, the byline is at once playful and sincere, a little bit knowing, a little bit felt. Whether arrived at by design or accident, schematic or stochastic, is unclear, but his work does bear ample evidence of genre-cidal tendencies. Exhibit A: first TRS release, Listen To My Nerves Hum (charted here), and its ‘piano’s parlour prissiness with irruptions,’ against Exhibit B: the ‘abstract psychedelic post-everything’ of follow-up, The Bet (igloo-view here). Digitalis don, Brad Rose, now offers the Norwegian sound-dabbler an outlet for further quirky collage and slippery soundscape fare with latest, Mood Chaser, which again leans toward a stylistically wandering gait—a set of hallucinogenic synthesis dissolved in woozy lo-fi ambient solution with liquid pulse and sundry electronic detritus.
In a recent interview after The Bet, Finger offered: ‘I’m always trying to create something slightly out of the norm. […] I’m glad that some reviewers have mentioned that they felt they never knew what was coming next while listening through the album. […] Then I’m fulfilling my intentions with the album.’ His intentions seem similarly inclined here, leading him astray ever further than before in this wilful hodgepodge. Mood Chaser does what it says on the tin in its restless mood-swing quest, combing through deconstructed fragments and saturated noise ripples in an endearingly ungainly slalom across analog and post-industrial templates, from Kosmische aperture to chthonic claustrophobia. Take the quirkily named “Elfin Geezer”: it goes into reverse, glitch, and collapse all at once, before settling on an insistent acoustic strum. Then there’s the everything-at-once entropy of opener, “Dwarf Palms,” the tumbledown techno of “Saguaro Cactus,” the orchestral intimations of “Nicotin Weather,” and the sub-aquatic motorik electro-shimmy of “Odd Infinitum.” Electronic sound resounds around, here, there and everywhere, as Finger probes inside to tweak out odd noise twists. In fact, oddness runs right through it, often compellingly, even when otherwise musically and technically attenuated. And where The Bet was sometimes attenuated in its sonic expression, Mood Chaser inclines towards more forceful articulation.
Overall, for all its restless experimental urge may make it an unstable company, Mood Chaser somehow coheres into something—if anything more album-shaped than its predecessor, though the not-so-much-easy as winsome listening of some earlier work may be in shorter supply. Such comparisons are, however, somewhat otiose, as Finger seems to be seeking something else here. Though what that else-ness might consist in is ineffable, it definitely makes for an amusing diversion.
Mood Chaser is available on Digitalis.
