Moving Giant Ships At The Speed Of Snails
Electronic music, dance music, experimental music based on drum machines and samples...call it what you will but this largely computer realized and crafted music has undergone vast changes since its popular inception sometime in the mid ‘90s (okay, we're not talking Pierre Schaeffer here). The Chemical Brothers are still alive and well, as are UNKLE, Boards of Canada, MOM, Bjork, DJ Shadow and a handful of others, but MIA is Aphex Twin, Plug and of late, Tom Jenkinson (though his last album was a winner). Since those days of hardware created electronica, the means to digital madness has changed, all those Atari computers and Akai samplers dumped en masse for soft synths and plug-ins, and the general ease of Pro Tools assemblage. Unfortunately, along with the big dump went a lot of hard won creativity. Alas, anyone can build a sample-created song in seconds in Pro Tools these days, but only a few continue to make music that thrills, chills, or scares the beejesus out of the children. One assailant worth your iPod time is Odd Nosdam.
A sonic sculptor of the highest electronic order, Odd Nosdam recalls old school boffins like Muslimgauze and Future Sound Of London. Odd's latest album, Level Live Wires, is a frequently slow moving and spooky mindfreak of found sounds, choppy beats, spoken word disconnections, and something like the sound of giant ghost ships banging against dead hulls at midnight. On par with Tortoise's groundbreaking "Hello Grandma and Grandpa (from Millions Now Living Will Never Die)," Level Live Wires collects 8-track recordings, Dictaphone tape, field recordings and lost 33 1/3 records (LPs grandpa?) into a disturbing, yet satisfying collage. As the producer of cLOUDDEAD and as in his debut, Burner, David P. Madson (aka Odd Nosdam) shows how real electronic music is done right. Joined here by TV on the Radio's Tunde Adebimpe, the sound terrorist coaxes a variety of tonalities and turbulences from his Oakland based rig. Songs begin like looming sludge and often end abruptly like a tape spool has suddenly run its course. "Fat Hooks" is typical of the album's polluted horizon beauty.
Coming into earshot like an insect that quickly grows from bite-sized to body dwarfing, "Fat Hooks" is all a blur, whirring loops jammed against a misanthrope hip-hop beat, choral voices swaying in some dead tech breeze, crunching samples slapping your brain while they debate whether to free you or go deeper in the pit. The latter is the decision, the beats becoming larger, the voices soaring like demon calls. But as with the rest of the album, the sum effect is one of stained glass beauty. Nausea as relief, loops as freedom, Gregorian chant as eternal balm. Then it's over, and too soon, decaying and disintegrating in the heat.
Level Live Wires maintains this horror party vibe throughout, whether dropkicking stowaways in "On," playing the gentle family card in "Kill Tone," snatching victory from the jaws of Portishead in "We Dead" (someone actually repeats that through the entire track), or blasting the earth clean of all animal and plant life in "Freakout 3." Of course, these are only my poorly created images of the snuff sample fest in Madson's crazy brain; please enter at your own pleasure or risk.
Odd Nosdam: "Fat Hooks" (MP3, 5:46)
