That rare combination of intellectual stimulus and visceral irresistability.
A colonial pattern is the cooperative formation of complex patterns, like the snowflakes drifting earthwards to the growth and spread of bacteria. Creating complex spatio-temporal patterns is, according to their chronicler, physicist Eshel Ben-Jacob, a strategy for coping with a hostile environment. And, as anyone who has every seen a snowflake up close or the image of a pathogen multiplied thousands of times, they are often beautiful to behold.
I might characterize some of Huerco S.’s patterns as conventionally beautiful and some not, but they are all certainly compelling. Brian Leeds from Kansas City works with less than state-of-the-art equipment to create a truly unique backstreet off the main techno drag. A former art student, there is palpable texture and a strong visual element to each of the fourteen tracks on Colonial Patterns, his debut long-player. As an enthusiast of southwestern, Native American-inspired architecture, he has been inspired to deconstruct the urban music of the civilization that eradicated it and build it up anew in another form.
Leeds’ extremely clever patterns colonize an imaginary field both rural and urban, creating by dismantling, making the whole broken and the broken pristine, where big sky ruralism sits comfortably beside big-city funk, a pastoral scene is invaded by Hollywood gangsters, new weird folktronica rubs up against New York tape-experiment minimalism.
That rare combination of intellectual stimulus and visceral irresistability.
Colonial Patterns is available on Software.
