The album as a whole strikes a difficult balance — the tracks vary from the beatless to the beat-rich yet Solipsism’s sound is recognizable throughout. Plus, quite aside from the technical merits, the tracks sound great when turned up really, really loud.
[Listen | Purchase] Solipsism is the nom de guerre of Glasgow’s Herb Recordings label head Craig Murphy. The Herb catalogue has gotten long-term play around Igloo and D:N including the excellent KINGBASTARD mix back in 2009 on Digital:Nimbus Show 351. Their output tends to exactly the strains of experimental electronic that gets our motors moving and this latest excursion from Murphy is no exception.
“All Your Wishes Won’t Come True” brings a shifting dub techno thump with a distant melody line like a saxophone played in a subway station. Slapback echoes keep it interesting through a couple of tear it down / bring it back sections. After it recedes, “Get Out of your Prisms” bleeps and bloops its way into existence — the computer chatter continues as an ominous bassline builds into a menacing beat, bringing to mind the Königsfost era of Wolfgang Voight’s Gas project.
The title of “My Antenna is Faulty, Can You Fix it?” suggests the track’s sonic atmosphere: filterswept synths, shortwave squiggles and squelches, snatches of half-heard vocal samples. However, it didn’t prepare me for the straight-up-and-down microhouse percussion track that got my head nodding. Following that uptempo workout, the ambient washes of “Stargazer” provide welcome respite. Chord swells gently mix with layers of delayed and backwards melodies for a pleasant interlude before “The Builders of Matter” brings the beats back for a nice hip-hop inflected track.
“Refract Me, Don’t Subtract Me” lays down a granular clicks-n-cuts rhythm and gradually fills in the instrumentation with guitar tracks ranging from the nearly clean to the barely recognizable. The album’s second musical question, “Is there A Light At The End of Your Tunnel?” builds from a quiet, sustained minor-chord drone to a dense, swirling cacophony of overlapping synths and then, after peaking somewhere around the five-minute mark, fades back out. The light was perhaps an oncoming train but fortunately it seems to have left us unharmed.
Moving into the closing phase of the album, “Transmuter” brings us a Köln-style ‘schaffel’ techno beat; “Deconstruct this Reality” is mainly a 4/4 kick-driven affair until Murphy’s shimmering guitar comes in two-thirds of the way through and takes the track into shoegaze territory; and “As Far As The Eye Can See, We’ll Be There” is a brief, beatless Frippertronics-style tone poem. As closers go, “Dissolving Boundaries” is a doozy: more deep Gas thumping lays the groundwork for the most up-front guitarwork on the album. A distorted lead and post-rock tremolo picking stay just shy of wall-of-sound noisy, fighting against the constraints of the techno beat and ultimately exhausting themselves, leaving the song to trail off into memory.
The presser for the release states that “all the ambience in this album was created by Murphy on his heavily-effected then processed Electric Guitar” and I found myself revisiting tracks to try to pick out the wizardry on display. The album as a whole strikes a difficult balance — the tracks vary from the beatless to the beat-rich yet Solipsism’s sound is recognizable throughout. Plus, quite aside from the technical merits, the tracks sound great when turned up really, really loud.
Refract Me, Don’t Subtract Me is out now on Herb. [Listen | Purchase]
