An adept rhythm and sound-smith, Crisopa has added a more vivid melodic voice and greater grain.
A decade ago igloomag followers’ pulses will have quickened to hear of ‘perfect generically-engineered output from a hypothesized ‘IDM’ buzz sound generator […] a throwing together of all those textural and architectural features characteristic of the sub-genre: slightly melancholic reminiscent melodies, wibbles and bloops, glitchy microsounds and skittery percussion.’ This somewhat frothy review of Proem (Merck, 2006) came to mind when, over a half-decade on, curators of ’emotional experiments in music’ with a shoe-ward gaze, n5MD, released a like-mind Nu-IDM variant, Crisopa‘s Biodance; and its successor, A Lucid Dream Kit, a similarly hybrid vehicle fueled with melodic smears from a spruced-up palette by Santiago Lizón, whose bright blending bent transcends mimetic mien and plagiaristic practice.
From the outset sounds distend and contract pulled and pushed by appropriations from wonky (“Sincrolunes,” “Hurgo“) and post-garage (“Zhulong“). Such influences as are explicit, e.g. BoC (“Fading Away Microwave Popcorn,” “Basketball in the Rain“) and Fourtet (“Vamos Hacia Un Gran Sol“), are avowed (n5MD blurb), though distilled enough to disarm charges of derivativeness. Operating with a self-reflexive genre-consciousness does not preclude creativity, but demands it all the more. An adept rhythm and sound-smith, Crisopa has added a more vivid melodic voice and greater grain. A vein of electronic listening music—from early Autechre to Plaid and Bola to 2nd/3rd generation (cf. Proem, Ochre, Ital Tek and the likes of the Tympanik Audio roster)—has had further fertile mining. A piece like “Control de Galibo,” for example, is an object lesson in applied IDMology—virtual symphonics underpinned by beat-crunch and fizz-skitter, tight but tweaked, awash in ’verbed-up digital heaven, attended by sunburst-finish synth eruptions, all lush atmospherics and textural teeming.
A Lucid Dream Kit might be something of a call to IDM-people who’ve lately had little to wake up for, the body of beat-driven electronics having been passed around, house-to-house, hiphop to hypnagogue, in jaded pleasuring. So… ‘one of the most consummate statements ever in the post-Warp Merck/Toytronic/n5MD vernacular of IDM-language, judged purely on the basis of musical and sound production values’ (Lockett, 2006)? No cigar… but close.
A Lucid Dream Kit is available on n5MD.
