From noise to nice. Harsh to honed. Squelch to sculpture. Ectospasm is a 10/10 top-tier proposition for anyone still prepared to leave the comfort of the known and go poking around in whatever is moving about underneath it.
Stomping through a distorting ping and brace-breakbeat
Now that’s more like it. Production pushed deeper into the exploratory, the exploratory pushed deeper into the production, atmospheres absolutely everywhere on Myoptik‘s latest drop Ectospasm. Eight experimental sculptures, two of which are, for reasons that remain gloriously inexplicable, fifteen-minute attention-stretching time-space continuum-ripping mind-warping rational-pondering joy events, taking us somewhere between possibility and potential while making a quite deliberate decision not to run with the pack. Which is probably why, by the time we emerge, we are unequivocally not the same creation that pressed the first triangle and set track one loose.
There is parasitic dalliance via opener “Framez v4.” Breaks. Squelches. Drum with bass, drum without bass, things behaving like drum and bass while being absolutely, defiantly, not drum and bass. That’s not drum and bass. Later, malfunctioning ambience arrives with the express intention of making relaxation impossible. Big fat industriana follows, metal-bashing its way through both form and formlessness, while the machinery seems increasingly uncertain about whether it is machinery at all.
Then comes the epic whale of time that is “Dirt stoP Pt2″—and yes, that very awkward capital P is a tell—stomping through a distorting ping and brace-breakbeat, vocal treatments twitching at the edges while bubbling synths disappear down some kind of mycelium reverie. It’s enormous. It’s odd. It takes its time. It does not apologise for any of this.
The first of our fifteen-minute treats is the caterwauling, mind-expanding throwdown of “Dungeon Stalker E,” a thing that thrashes your backside onto the floor and then protests at every subsequent attempt to stay still. And this, folks of all genders, is where those with enough gall—or precisely the right concoction of consciousness—to keep up for its full duration may well have attained legendary status. Absolutely wicked belter of a tune. The kind that turns up halfway through a collection and suddenly puts the whole damn thing in my top ten of the year. Spanking, dog-down-deep, dirty shizzle. A proper monster.
Completely bent-out-of-shape genre-hybridizing ::
And somewhere across all this glorious disobedience is perhaps the most diverse, inclusive and completely bent-out-of-shape genre-hybridizing archetype for modern times you’re likely to encounter. Ectospasm doesn’t just blur the boundaries between genres; it seems to regard the boundaries themselves as an outdated administrative error. Everything gets invited. Everything gets mangled. Everything gets a turn. Breakbeat, noise, ambience, industrial, squelch, electronics and whatever else happens to wander into the room are thrown into the same beautifully dysfunctional ecosystem and left to figure out their own relationships.
And that’s really the thing with Ectospasm. It routinely refuses to play the game. It doesn’t seem particularly interested in familiarity, conformity, genre obedience or that increasingly tedious practice of self-aggrandising pastiche where the safest way to sound new is apparently to sound exactly like the people you already know.
This is not lazy music.
It is music working. Properly working. Working at the listener. Working on the listener. Working hard enough to create the possibility of something happening that wasn’t already there when you pressed play.
And because of that, it is absolutely full of potential.
From noise to nice. Harsh to honed. Squelch to sculpture. Ectospasm is a 10/10 top-tier proposition for anyone still prepared to leave the comfort of the known and go poking around in whatever is moving about underneath it.
Ectospasm is available on Zoku – Zoku. [Bandcamp]
