Sounding like a prophet atop a scaffolded structure, Fred Moton speaks through a halogen miasma of industrial smog and announces Nervous System in no uncertain terms: “What we are left with now is a task to refuse that opposition” (1). Prophetic visions / critical accounting for the past, the club / the headphones, the body / the mind - no more. On the title track, muscular arpeggios snake through the audio spectrum and do the work of a mind undoing knots. This is the blur before the binoculars focus; beauty made visible by diffusion.
Dysphoric Agent takes this haze and zooms in. Gaseous arpeggiated eddies twitching in the margins get their frame rate cranked, and it becomes clear that something is regulating all of this movement. Drums shoot out from four dimensions while detuned tones glow in a lattice web behind. Rhythms here don’t mark time - they speak. Coiling and unspooling inside of low end punctuation, every sentence pounds home a simple message. Something here is alive.
Trigger Warning is a club track that posses the sort of ontological integrity usually reserved for those that are able to do things like protest and order delivery vaporizers. Every break, every subterranean growl, every jolt of electricity works in tandem. This one comes out speakers with a force so authoritative that not moving to it feels like disobedience to a greater good.
My eyes Rolling Back In My Head is the sound of neuron’s fraying. The visceral surge of Trigger Warning clarifies here into a tapestry of strobing voices, static forced into meter, and drums that snap at a spot two doors down from euphoria. Your senses can push you this far, and it feels like a miracle.
After reaching the end of that hallway, the nerves beg for rest. Third Ear animates this most undeniable of requests. From a bed internal emerges an oddly diegetic noise: an acoustic guitar. Something inside has gone to sleep, and the external floods in. Complicating this moment of reprieve are the strings of that arpeggiated system drawing helixes on the audio spectrum, threatening once again to plunge us deep.
(1) Fred Moton, The Multiplicity Turn: Theories of Identity from Poetry to Mathematics seminar - November 24, 2021.
With guest appearances from clipping., Nicolas Jaar, Angel Bat Dawid & more, “Rhizomes” is a dense experimental masterpiece. Bandcamp New & Notable Oct 6, 2023
Guenter Råler plays with the stereo field on this disorienting but absorbing experimental electronic EP to capture a sense of vulnerability. Bandcamp New & Notable May 23, 2023