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(SUBTRACTIVELAD :: Suture, CD) There’s a bevy of virtual machines working at Stephen Hummel’s behest
on his second release as subtractiveLAD for n5md. A host of machines
are capering and cavorting in concert with Hummel’s direction, chasing
after his mouse pointer like eager puppies or fervent sycophants.
Billed as a darker vision than his 2005 release (Giving Up The
Ghost), Suture boils with more caustic energies. There are
jagged peaks on his modular melodies, sheared edges on his beats that
leave them unstable and a hint of dirty static gumming up the tender
works of his percussion.
“Petals” builds from ambient tones and echoes of voices lost in a
cavernous train station to an apoplectic hurricane of sound, a wash of
white noise that collapses into the first of many melodic passages
which are born from the electrified grid of Hummel’s imagination.
“Brokadocious” captures the textured interplay of Hummel’s virtual
machinery as distinct voices dart around each other with synthetic
passion, a fusion of strings and voices that capers like children on
May Day. The round synths of “Twinge” are full-bellied beasts that
squelch with summer ripeness as they are massaged by shuffling drum
pads and watery breezes; it’s a panoply of rhythms that flit about one
another with luxurious voluptuousness. “Lepidoptera,” on the other
hand, while maintaining this same level of carefree complexity, is
butterfly music made for a later season — early fall when there is a
crispness to the air and the melodies are a bit more lean and
poignant.
Hummel drifts from torpid summer indolence to autumnal chill music as
the album progresses. “Rerum Natura” is a diaphanous fabrication of
ghostly notes and programming that patters like an early evening rain
storm. “Soft Inside” pops and crackles with a bit more foreground
noises while the melodies chime and ring like an amplified piano left
out in the rain too long. This is like the warm underbelly of a
winter animal: soft, warm and enveloping. “Your Tattoo” is nearly
invisible in its entrance — just a whisper of static and a vague echo
of a drone — that starts as an itch (the persistent sound of skin
being scoured by fingernails) before the dry epidermal scratch
blossoms into a programmed drum kit and the rising thermal of an
evolving tone poem.
While he creates gorgeous melodies and rhythms that are like Boards of
Canada ambience as re-imagined by Peter Namlook for a FAX record (the
sweeping organic flow of “Embryonic Again,” for example), Hummel also
experiments with virtual machines that pop and crunch with generative
chaos — Autechre style gurgles that grind against VR orchestras in
programmed mash-ups that blend the cardiotonic exercise of
machine-generated beats with rarified exhortations of stringed
instruments (ala “Sleepwalker”). Maybe “Between the Mind and Body”
encapsulates the musical creation he is trying to accomplish with
Suture: the delicate vibe of ambient expressionism bound to
the crackling chaos of digital impressionism in an effort to make
music which rises like a vapor in the mind while sustaining the body’s
need for movement music.
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(RUN_RETURN :: Animals Are Beautiful People, 7inch) Two tracks to tease your brain, Run_Return’s 7″ orange vinyl release
is a blast of post-rock instrumental programming augmented by a welter
of live instrumentation that hums with hints of Tortoise and Telefon
Tel Aviv without leaving any linger sense of being a pale imitation of
either. Anchored by three guys with their fingers on all sorts of
strings, triggers and percussion, Run_Return charms with its
enthusiasm for textured nuances that meld future jazz with IDM,
post-rock with orchestral visitations and ambient innocence with
squelchy frisson.
A-side “Animals Are Beautiful People” roars into being with a clatter
of percussion and an echo of voices like a stampede of escaping zoo
animals. As the laconic melodies weave into a soundscape that boasts
the warm light and heat of indolent summers, we can only sink into the
waves of sound as if we were being carried away on the backs of
gamboling animals. B-side “Mercury Retrograde” (a non-album track)
hums with digitized voices, earnest synths and a room full of
percussion, both live and binary. Laying bare Run_Return’s
fascination with rhythms — both living and fabricated — this track
is 21st century body mood music: made for the soul, intriguing for
the head and intoxicating for the body.
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(RUN_RETURN :: Metro-North, CD) Swirling together a healthy dose of the Compost-style fascination with
re-invigorating late period Miles Davis with the vanguard rock
instrumental landscapes rising out of Chicago and Montreal, Run_Return
is the comprehensive efforts of Kevin Dineen, Tommy Fuselsang and Raj
Ojha. For Metro-North, they program granular beat
environments, layer warm synthesizer melodies over the top before
picking up guitar, bass, drum kit and marimba (to start, they’re not
adverse to bringing in other instrumentation as needed to build their
moody pieces) to fuse IDM and improvisational rock elements into
something that is captivatingly organic and dense. It is the work of
twelve done by the hands of three, a compression of sprawling prog
epics into taut little jazz club numbers that are too carefully
constructed to just be unrestrained musical chaos.
“Aerospace Lanes” unfolds like a Lionel Hampton collaboration with
Boards of Canada, ripe with vibraphone and skittering beat
programming; “Louis James Corrigan” swallows the downtempo vibe whole
and we all go down to soft darkness of the whale belly where cellos
sing a winsome melodic counterpoint to effusive synthesizers.
“Weights and Measures” sizzles with drums and cinematic programming —
the rollicking tale of scientific measurements as transformed into an
invigorating epic of robust keyboards and nimble percussion. “Loge
Blue” is a demur expression of organic synthetics and marimba,
insouciant keyboards dancing hand-in-hand with a tight hi-hat, rolling
stick work and a smooth bass line.
Guest guitar work on “Our Pleasure To Serve You” fractures the warmth
of Run_Return’s typical sound (as if that can be said with a straight
face in the first place) with a shuddering cry of jagged strings.
Analog synths and the persistent click of the drum kit anchor the song
in the warm meadowland of innocent IDM territory, but Andrew Seger’s
guitar alternates with the shuddering cry of its strings (complete
with an echo of bird song which the song ultimately devolves into) or
it rolls across the landscape like a pleasing breath of warm air.
“Soothing Syrup” is a digital panacea (initially), a bubbling cocktail
of programming, drum pads and cut-up vocals. Guitar and marimba sneak
into the mix, an infestation which disturbs the virtual fabric of the
song with a dollop of organic life. The song is transformed into a
glistening array of bell tones, digitized notes which sound as if they
are born of mallet and wood but have a sheen that seems too pristine
to not be treated by DSP.
“Remote Sensing” is flush with synthesizer reverb and drum box echo, a
warbling passage of subway trains that clicks and swooshes past, and
trailing in its wake is a banjo melody that seems to be the source of
the synthesizer echo (kind of a reversed time loop). The banjo fades
into a clatter of percussion and marimba before being dissolved by a
swelling burst of synthesizer. It’s a song that seems backwards and
inverted and yet unfolds just fine in your head. Title track “Metro
North” lets out all the stops, a kitchen sink summation of all the
tricks and progressions which have been hinted at in the previous
sixteen tracks: a climactic flourish of electronics, jazz rhythms and
synthesized melodies.
This is the underlying magic of Run_Return: it sounds so real-time,
but (time and again) you hear elements which are digitally generated.
There is a secret layer of computer trickery going on in the heart of
Run_Return’s organic jazz instrumentals, a 21st century love affair
with the touch of a button and the pass of a filter. I’m not making
note of this as if I have yanked back the curtain and revealed the
knobs and dials of the wizard’s booth, but rather to marvel at the
complexity of their efforts. Run_Return have gone beyond such facile
attempts of genre marking as “post” and “future” and are simply living
in the 21st century — the world of hand-made and machine-made — and
are making cyborg music. It is the groove of both our human hearts
and the machine pulse of our culture. Very nice. (Buy it at Amazon.com)
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Suture is out February 14th, 2006. Metro-North and Animals Are Beautiful People are out now on n5MD.
