Having recorded for Mille Plateaux, Sub Rosa and
Tigerbeat6, The Rip-Off Artist (Matt Haines) releases work on his very
own new project, the Inflatabl imprint. New Clear Days is something
of a combination of the sensibilities you will find throughout all of
the above, but twists the rules as usual. It’s like three separate mini
albums in one. All under three minutes, the initial tracks connoted as
Protons make this, ultimately, a very playful techno/electro romp.
There are sweet, creamy Warp’esque flavors, a mechanical parade of
numbers and digits. His glitchy more atonally centered beats (disguised
as percussion) start to perk and be known in section two, logically
entitled Neutrons. Here Haines dabbles a bit in Asian chimes and
spatial bliss. Reverberation, with a grey flannel sophistication make
tracks like “Alpha Particles (Parts 1-3)” float freely as spheres and
miscellaneous shapes coalescing in air and finding the edges of the
composition without necessarily connecting the dots. “Beta Particles”
cannot be contained, so we are the aural voyeur to an experiment in
splitting sound that has a general contemporary feel, and yet, is being
toyed with and morphed radically into “Gamma Rays.”
The final
installment of tracks are the Electrons consisting of seven short
electro-haikus. This sounds like someone snuck up from behind Jeff
Mills and is tickling his armpits at a big ‘ole dance rave, but he keeps
on spinning, a bit off kilter but smiles and no one sees his sweat. But
behind the hi jinx, The Rip-Off Artist controls the harmonic strings of
his own creation, the mechanics are sprite and bounce off the wall like
a rubber ball. “Duck and Cover” has this infectious head meets hip in
the 4th dimension thing going on and so it goes as the Electrons connect
the dots back to the Neutrons drawing lines to the Protons.
New Clear Days will be available on May 3 at www.inflatabl.com.
