Bovaflux :: When There Was Nothing (Highpoint Lowlife, CD)

 (09.02.05) There’s an unspoken ephemeral quality to laptop music: it comes from nothing and yet can make something indelibly organic in its sound. As instruments become less physical and more virtual, their origins become more foreign and alien while they simultaneously attempt to hide behind a facade of familiarity. You start to lose track of how sounds are made — they just are there floating in your head — and you try to grasp them, but they are just ghostly wisps. Bovaflux offers When There Was Nothing, a soundtrack to transient noises, a collection of phantasmal melodies whose half-life isn’t much more than a few seconds of sustain and delay caught in the cones of your speakers.

Scattered beat programming skips through the planes of innocent melodies like “Bridge” where the beats flitter like a stampede of small children racing for the ice cream truck while in “Ohne Namen,” the pulse is a lazy hip-hop beat, one that’ll make it around the block eventually but is in no real hurry. “Sleepytime” squirts and darts
with digital frisson, a chaotic pattern of noises that boil beneath the slowly evolving melodic line. “Torchlight” shuffles like a line
of condemned prisoners, grounding an atmosphere with a relentless march towards the inpenetrable future.

More somber and restrained than the buoyant innocence of Boards of Canada, Bovaflux’s music falls into the same broad category of
knob-twiddling: full of intricate melodies, complex rhythms and gamboling digital detritus. There’s a hint of self-awareness to
Bovaflux’s music though, a nod towards the imprecise existence of electronic music. It only exists in the presence of electricity and,
as such, can’t really be alive. As much as it yearns to be otherwise. It may sound organic; it may sound full of emotional empathy. But it isn’t. It’s just ones and zeros masquerading as a real person. Had me fooled.

When There Was Nothing is out now on Highpoint Lowlife.

• Highpoint Lowlife
• Bovaflux