en·tan·gle
tr.v. en·tan·gled, en·tan·gling, en·tan·gles
- To twist together or entwine into a confusing mass
en·tangle·ment n.
In this case the ‘confusing mass’ is a funk-footed Voltron like creature formed by the conjunction of Circuit Bent, Sun in Aquarius, The Mollusk, Tom Cosm and Mr Bill. The coterie of Pacific producers first fused almost two years ago resulting in this deliciously eclectic EP of psychedelic glitchiness. Imagine my excitement then when I discovered that the beast would be adding a few new appendages for Entanglement 2 in the form of fellow southerners The Mollusk and Foldy as well as American wunderkind Freddy Todd. Alas the press release made some vague mention of an impending launch party and I experienced a pang of regret knowing that none of this crew (let alone all of them) would be foolish enough to quit their sunny southern climes to brave a northern winter. Fortunately I was guilty of a mistaken assumption; that the party would take place in physical space. Instead, each of the collaborators would be playing a one hour set from the comfort of their home studios to a live audience scattered across the four corners of the globe on Christmas day.
And so I rose early on the 25th and logged onto plug.dj/entanglement thinking to myself that I’d leave the stream blasting in the background and go about the usual Christmas business of food and family. Instead I spent the next 4 hours glued to my keyboard laughing my ass off and conversing with a bunch of random strangers over a soundtrack exponentially superior to any Christmas compilation I’ve ever come across. It was, in the words of Tom Cosm ”the coolest thing I’ve ever done on the internet, and I’ve done a fair few things.” Now I doubt that I’ll actually be able to convince anyone reading this review that hanging out in a chat room listening to a bunch of live mixes is really all that fun so instead I’m just going to urge you to give it a try.
As for the EP itself, it more than lives up to expectations. Floating somewhere out in the misty borderlands of modern psychedelic bass music, it’s the attention to detail and painstaking sound design which really blew me away. Dispensing with that old dance music tenet ‘Thou Shalt Repeat’ every track is a constantly morphing rhythmic evolution laced with grinding bass stabs and progressive flourishes. Meanwhile vocal snippets and snatches of melody continually pierce the madness to shine light on uncountable intricate experiments in sound design. To effectively combat a Voltron of this calibre I can only imagine a 12 foot Frankenstein stitched from the corpses of Art Tatum, Pierre Schaeffer and Jimi Hendrix, the lumbering giant powered by a digital brain spawned on the entangled hard drives of Venetian Snares, Aphex Twin and Simon Posford. Even then I expect it would be a close battle.
Entanglement 2 is available on Bandcamp.
