In this carnival of music, with an unreliable narrator as your guide, listeners are liable to move from one attraction to the next, thrilled by the slight menace and delighted by the cotton ear candy.
Classic acid sounds with a dash of humor beneath a darkly trickster-like exterior
These vital bleeps revivify the life force of classic acid sounds with a dash of humor beneath a darkly trickster-like exterior. The chilling meets the jovial courtesy of Fluffy Inside where the chirps and flutters flow and burn like flame from a welder wielding and acetylene torch. Unreliable Narrator is an album that pulls you in along a buoyant up and down path of swirling 808s and bouncing beats that kick, pound, thud and land their hi-hat hits in all the right places.
One of the things I like about this album is the use of warped vocal samples throughout. Some put out the claws of a vague menace while others are hued by a retro-futurist nostalgia that reminds me of the space age we were promised, but has never arrived. The album starts with “Tangerine 83” and someone talking about music -or something- “released in 1993.” Fluffy Inside’s brand of electronica recalls some of the best from the nineties.
The jittering cadences continue to shuffle into unpredictable patterns on the lysergically inclined “Ropey Ladder.” Here the combination of twisted electro is mixed with squamous spirals of sound. The next track drops in with heavy bass club hits and classic sci-fi-like vocal samples about telephones, recalling those voyages to other worlds, or at least connecting us with people in distant towns. “Telephobia” is a good name and conjures up the fear of cell phones we all should have these days under the system of surveillance capitalism. It’s still a good tune to groove to, even with its undertones suggestive of something sinister about to happen.
A panopticon of electronic switches and controls ::
Classic techno lines and riffs are prominent all across this release. No need to fix what isn’t broken. Yet like any form of music that has been set into a certain mode of expression, the creativity comes from how the artist works within the genre. The textures here skitter and slide across a panopticon of electronic switches and controls with wobbulating details perfected on tracks like “Shades” and “Summer Last.”
This is the kind of music I’d want to hear on my way back from the club to the afterparty while the cough syrup is still at its strongest. At least, hypothetically speaking. Yet, when I get to the location of the afterparty I’d be a bit apprehensive about going in because it looks like it is in some dodgy haunted house. Strange sonic signatures shimmer like spectral ghosts across the songs. Yet I find myself laughing at myself when I finally do go in, because it’s Fluffy Inside.
In this carnival of music, with an unreliable narrator as your guide, listeners are liable to move from one attraction to the next, thrilled by the slight menace and delighted by the cotton ear candy.
Unreliable Narrator is available on Neo Ouija. [Bandcamp]
