The tendency in some quarters to deride electronica for its 'bleepiness' is something Fell seems to address head on with the first three tracks on 'UL8'. With many of the 20 tracks resembling the sound of 'Pong,' tweaked, phased, pitch-shifted and generally fucked about, 'UL8' has to be the most
intense bleepfest I've ever had assail my aural receptors. But not only does he out-bleep the bleepers such as Autechre, but he also takes the vogue for Chip Tunes to a whole new level in what is surely the most deconstructed of digital dance albums.
Part 1 - 'The Occultation of 3C 273' – consists of five tracks which explore the ‘ping’ to its logical conclusion. Exhaustive, exhausting and fascinating, these tracks see Fell focus in the minutiae of frequency and oscillation. Toward the end of 'The Occultation of 3C 273' section, Fell begins to introduce a broader range of textures and tones, with longer sounds - background hisses, rather than actual drones - that slowly develop into lower-frequency rumbles. Thse slowly evolve into what forms the basis of the next six tracks, which collectively form 'Vortex Studies.'
Here, the eighth track of the album takes the form of an almost subliminal crackle of pink noise through which soft, rapid pulses are wired straight into the brain, a mutter line of ambience that's so subtle as to become entwined with the sound of the blood in your ears as it circulates through your body. The only thing to do is surrender to the sonic waves as they undulate with varying rapidity, alternately connecting with and directing the body’s internal rhythms. It's quite an experience.
There does reach a point at which 'UL8' seems to disappear into the background, or is otherwise absorbed into the internal network of the soft machine. There's only so much low-level crackle and fizz that the brain can take and remain focused, because there's nothing really there to engage with.
Track fourteen, the second piece in Part 3 ('Acids in the Style of Rian Treanor') returns to more 'percussive' sounds, albeit treated beyond recognition, reduced to rapid skitters that flicker across the senses, and toward the end of the album the last three tracks bring things full circle to the bouncing, phased blips of the opening triptych.
|
To this end, it's perhaps fair to say - and this is no criticism – that 'UL8' is more interesting experimentally than as a listening experience for pleasure. The liner notes and information on the press release are testament to this, going into immense technical detail that is far beyond the comprehension of your reviewer, and most others, I suspect. But that's ok. The avant-garde exists in a separate realm from the cultural mainstream, the popular, the knowledge of the layperson, and while it's easy to complain that the avant-garde produces work that is experimental for its own sake, it's equally true that where the avant-garde leads, the mainstream eventually follows. I'm not suggesting that in the future, there will be heaps of albums that sound like this riding high in the charts, but noting the fact that Mark Fell is clearly striving to push the parameters of music here. Besides, who would have thought, as little as twenty years ago, that computer game soundtracks would become an integral part of a musical subgenre on the digital underground, that there would even be a need to brand a form of music 'Bit Tunes' or that the sound of the Magnavox Odyssey 3000 would be considered in any way musical? Times change: brace yourselves for the future. Like the cover of 'UL8, it's probably orange....
Mark Fell Online
|
