Foraging through massive amounts of data and reconstituting them into byte-size recordings that have sporadic start and end points, The Best Of Yellow Yellow Salamand’r is a perplexing and dense assortment worth diving into head-first to unravel its mysterious trip.
An avalanche of ideas by a talented musician exploring left field audio and visual collages
Mike Fuchs (aka Yellow Salamand’r) has been at it for some time and The Best Of Yellow Salamand’r culls tracks created over the last 10 years; and one piece from 1981! Hailing from Ontario, Canada, the experimental electronic musician discovers surreal worlds and peculiar sonic landscapes to depict captivating panoramas; punctuating the unusual world we live in. Mixing equal parts avant-garde, musique concrète, abstract ambient, field recordings, mangled radio frequencies, modular synth maneuvers, and a slew of spoken-word samples intermixed with off-center conversations, Fuch’s describes these underground works as being on the “far edge of conventional,” and we utterly agree.
There are peaks and valleys throughout these 32 tracks; some with short runtimes and to the point, some slightly extended to create vintage-quality aural Polaroids. Each piece is affixed with its own unique image giving the listener a visual accompaniment to the already blurry sub-structures. Could we view the artists’ trajectory as “Post Punk Funk,” “Slop Pop,” “Psilocybernaut” electronics, “Radio Waving,” or simply “The Brainwashing of America”? It’s with dizzying and obscure effects that finds Yellow Salamand’r at the top of his craft; an avalanche of ideas by a talented musician exploring left field audio and visual collages.
Disjointed sound worlds ::
The sheer volume of sounds, both found and created from machines and recorders, takes this compilation into uncharted realms where predominately ambient and dilapidated electronics, broken drums, and meandering rhythms evade genre pigeonholes. And even within these chipped musical slabs and shifting textures, Yellow Salamand’r maintains his signature projection—be it complex and semi-coherent, or simply arcane. In fact, these disjointed sound worlds are the message, as subliminal as they are. Foraging through massive amounts of data and reconstituting them into byte-size recordings that have sporadic start and end points, The Best Of Yellow Yellow Salamand’r is a perplexing and dense assortment worth diving into head-first to unravel its mysterious trip. Fuchs Audio Technology, indeed!
Are salamanders friendly? “Despite their bright colors, salamanders are entirely harmless if they are not handled or touched. These small animals are somewhat reclusive, meaning that they generally run away from and avoid contact with humans.”
The Best Of Yellow Salamand’r is available on Bandcamp.
