Skymall :: Fooled By Randomness (Beta Bodega)

Skymall exhibits little restraint when it comes to unearthing strange electronic bursts of light and dark on Fooled By Randomness and reinforces where things left off between 2001-2008 with this newly revealed collection of expressive glitch-core.

A baffling, shifting, and dense foray into experimental electronics

To quote the release page, “Hidden deep in the recesses of hard drive purgatory, these tracks, recorded between 2001-2008, are the missing first album Skymall (aka Force.fed) never released.” The distinctive Miami, Florida-based experimental electronic record label, design, and political outfit—founded by La Mano Fria—seemed to close shop around 2005 after having amassed a hefty catalog for about 6 years. They’ve continued with other artistic avenues and begun to sprout again. With this unreleased snapshot of tracks—13 in total—Skymall exhibits little restraint when it comes to unearthing strange electronic bursts of light and dark on Fooled By Randomness.

Each track on Fooled By Randomness is a crackling smorgasbord of glitch bits, bytes, and manipulated segments and is an aptly titled album, to say the least. As the imprint consistently dives head-first into colorful sonic terrain being their visual signature, its roster hones in on abstract sound structures that have forged its existence all these years. Skymall only further reinforces where things left off between 2001-2008 with this newly revealed collection of expressive glitch-core.

Stretched and pulled together, tracks like “Superfecta” (a collaboration with Dino Felipe) collect broken beats, found sounds, and disjointed bleeps in a smattering of noisy but funky rhythms only to eventually break down into video-game styled glitch extracts. “Doking Station” (also a collab with Dino Felipe) falls head-first into a dense array of static charges, its crunchy undertone and buried melodic notes covered in detuned machinery that simply takes everything over. And this is where Skymall really expands the abstraction envelope—the outer layers of this lost album are utterly confounding, its deliberate and desolate noises are pushed heavily to the forefront. And yet, it’s in the background that you’ll find a fluttering heartbeat made from skittering beats and scraped cacophany (ref. “Don’t Move” and “Endpoint”). “Blank State,” “Vita” and “Sweeper” are even further launched into another space altogether, the layers of scorched rhythms, fleeting sirens, and DSP maneuvering allows these tracks to explode into thousands of pieces while “Sweeper,” on the other hand, takes a 25-second ambient reprieve. You’ll also find redeveloped Fennesz-inspired dust particles on the drone-like strands of “Floaters”—a symphony of drifting nostalgia meant for sunny days. “Rubber Cement” simply displays its explosive sounds of busted chiptune frequency jolts for a thorough sensory overload.

With Fooled By Randomness‘ arcane landscape, its leftfield and exploratory core is filled with turbulent and erratic sound-scraping debris, and it’s those—dare we say—“lighter” tracks that balance everything out. A baffling, shifting, and dense foray into experimental electronics.

Fooled By Randomness is available on Beta Bodega.