Eli Neuman-Hammond :: New Songs (Self Released)

New Songs avoids a simple, pandering “deconstructed club” characterization—which is part of what makes it so enjoyable. Instead, it champions a deceptive repetition-as-change monotony. Apparently improvised, there are few appositive statements that might lend room for disjointedness or cheap distraction.

An acute sense of acoustic curiosity

NYC-based composer Eli Neuman-Hammond has a tall resume, literally. Describing sound in rhetorical terms as a “multivalent, protean disturbance,” he yet records pieces that exude an acute sense of acoustic curiosity. Most possess and recall an innocent quality, an almost childlike desire to explore the limits of open space. It softens what might be an otherwise academic patina.

But when he’s not thanklessly gathering frequencies “like stones or snippets of conversation,” he’s setting fire to the aux with his hi-NRG side-project, fka Berzerk. New Songs, his latest vectored exponent, comes complete with four techno-inflected tracks.

New Songsexplores glitched-out, tonic-clonic textures, recapitulating the noisier articles from his field recording projects. These coalesce with rhythmic phrases that range from the mere didactic (throwing big drums, as on “Whistler”) to the more discursive (the vocal sample chops in “Meanness and humor”). And while leavened by a sense of humor—I was initially drawn by the deadpan title and the MS Paint-style artwork—the record is mostly serious, shades of Karpov vs. Kasparov.

Yet it graciously strays away from high-flown conceptions of self-styled “impossible-to-dance-to dance music”—New Songs is permeated with nods to the dance-floor residual. It suggests and behooves movement, though in mostly non-obvious ways. The compulsive chit-chatter of “Meanness” calls to mind the grandeur of rave, while “Bubbler,” to my ears at least, seems to reference the four-by-four insistence of ghetto house.

Altogether, New Songs avoids a simple, pandering “deconstructed club” characterization—which is part of what makes it so enjoyable. Instead, it champions a deceptive repetition-as-change monotony. Apparently improvised, there are few appositive statements that might lend room for disjointedness or cheap distraction. And despite the expansive eight-minute overture (“Bubbler”), it hardly succumbs to navel-gaze or the solipsism of big ideas. It simply embraces the tectonic bodily.

New Songs is available on Bandcamp.