(03.21.05) I love the name of Audiobulb’s new compilation Intricate Maximals. It suggests an environment of Mandelbrotian complexity, a series of whirrs, clicks, pops and bleeps that encompasses a virtuality of infinite expression. Modern electronic music with its thousand layers of DSP patches, virtual interfaces and unlimited track layering allows for music that can be both infuriating in its obtuseness and delightful in its confusion of elements. Intricate Maximals dodges the former by highlighting the latter.
Calika’s “Latticel Work” is a skewed pop song that has cloaked itself in a haze of machine noise and radio static, hiding the casual drum kit and winsome acoustic guitar beneath a field of staggering static pulses and arrhythmic metallic elements. Opener Autistici’s “Nurture Nature” burrs a field recording of birds and crickets with the slow cascade of siren tones and buzzing curves of processed noise, a broken soundtrack to an artificial world. Room performs a ‘ventrimix’ on “So Gone” by Diagram of Suburban Chaos, looping a wordless breath of female vocals against a slumbering beat and the rounded evolution of early morning sunrise tones in a pleasantly non-chaotic fashion.
There is stuttering glitch pop in Marion’s “Unpeopled,” clattering burps of sound against a laconic melody, while Cedar A.V.’s “Song for a Republic” slathers radio hiss over a slow acoustic melody, a folksy banana republic commentary that picks up a gamboling lattice work of glitch and micro-elements. As the song progresses, Cedar A.V. continues to layer elements, adding drum kit, squelchy synth pads and looped vocals to build a comprehensive slice of life from the tiny capital of a minuscule republic. Disastrato’s “Requiem Pour une Peuille Mort” is a Plunderphonics burst of synthesizers and vocals, a quick spin across the AM radio dial, capturing bursts of church chorals, piano music, half-words of talk shows, antique radio commercials still rattling about the dial and the barest hint of 50’s rock and roll. The requiem thunders through this cut-up of Americana before devolving into a shuddering rumble of subterranean magma
movement.
Effacer’s incomprehensibly titled “Ponl Misc Mol Msc Nyk Oocl Uasc Vroon Yang Ming” is the closet thing to a dub track, a sparse ping-pong affair that sounds like a minimalist version of a ~scape record. Room offers “Percule Extract,” a bare beatless hymn of horizon-seeking tones while Build’s “You Can Get Here From There (if you don’t mind the T left over)” builds gently from organic tones and harmonica into a luminous piece of soft ambience.
Containing eighteen tracks in all, Intricate Maximals compresses several dozen hours worth of musical motifs and ideas into eighty minutes of electronic expression. What keeps Audiobulb’s latest compilation interesting is the diversity of approaches and sonic creativity. There’s a lot of ideas here and most of them are executed with complex aplomb. Excellent.
Intricate Maximals is out now on Audiobulb Records.
- Audiobulb Website
- Switches (Review: May 2004)
- Exhibition #2 (Review: January 2004)
