Digitalis have been on a roll lately with a slew of light-hearted releases and Sculpture’s Slime Code is a perfect example.
There’s something just a little bit extra special about releases one initially dismisses based upon fleeting initial impressions, only to be inexplicably drawn back to them weeks, months or even years later for some reason and discovering a new firm favorite. London-based audiovisual act Sculpture’s Slime Code is just such an example. It stayed in the music library for months, never ceasing it’s hand-waving attempts to attract attention with its eye-popping, brain-addling cover artwork (which almost resembles those irritating 3D pictures that were popular once back in the 90s) and bizarre name until, several “what the hell” plays later it ended up on constant rotation.
Dan Hayhurst (music) and Reuben Sutherland (visuals) are the pair behind Sculpture, with two especially notable prior releases on Dekorder that were pressed up on picture discs featuring zoetrope images that created mind-bending animations when spun on a record deck, Slime Code giving you a small taster of what these look like on the disc labels and artwork of the vinyl edition. The lineage of Slime Code is just as baffling: recorded live directly to 8 track tape from which 7 unique dubs were sourced and recorded to 7 individual cassettes, these were then compiled into a four track digital edit and released on the Kaleidoscope in 2012. This new vinyl edition on Digitalis Recordings is not that digital edit, however, it is an alternate one created to fit as a two track vinyl release.
Side A features torrents of digital detritus, retro-analogue bleeps straight from the depths of seventies sci-fi silliness like Barbarella or Logan’s Run that threaten to completely derail the entire piece… and then they do! Sculpture always manage to claw back a sense of structure or linearity, however, through dizzying, liquefied Radiophonic synthesizer tones, deranged rhythms formed from unusual sources like the Orb’s traditional beats-free Orbvs Terrarvm or strands of lithium-laced techno. The latter half of Side A descends into unexpected, mechanized post-folk floating on a lake of gurgling, bubbling and twittering.
Side B dives straight into the deep end with such authoritative and thundering bass heft it’s hard not to sit up and take notice. Aerosolized, day-glo sonic debris is propelled from the speaker cones in multi-directional flumes as the distorted Orblivion style ambient dub rhythms thump the temples for the first five minutes before demented computer-bank bleeps delete the script and aging radio transmission start to bleed through in fits and starts along with torrents of bubbling, trickling fx and distorted sampled ephemera until it finally flickers out of existence.
Digitalis have been on a roll lately with a slew of light-hearted releases and Sculpture’s Slime Code is a perfect example. It’s clear that Sculpture aren’t taking things too seriously, as there’s an all-pervading sense of humor and fun that is missing from so much experimental music in which the soul and spirit of the music is dragged to the bottom of an ocean of earnest knob-twiddling. There’s not a moment on Slime Code that leaves you thinking maybe they should have toned it down, or snipped a bit here and there, it’s just one long roller-coaster ride.
Slime Code is available now on Digitalis. [Release Page | Sculpture]
