Manchester's Joe Beedles follows up last year's convincingly magickal "Exigent Set" with another grab-bag of DSP-corrupted electronics and post-AE psychoacoustic splosh.
It doesn't take long for "Sinecures" to throw normative structure almost fully out the window. 'Rise' begins slowly and surely enough with a pinpoint resonant drone that falls gently into dissonance, eventually becoming submerged by seismic low-end. But before the track fizzles to a halt, it's ruptured by Beedles' gravely laptop crunches that foreshadow 'fuPG' with its fragmented, pointillist rhythms and wit-squelching frequency shifts. 'threshr' is comparatively soft-hearted, just as gristled as its predecessors but offset by tingling music box blips that hint at "EP7"-era AE without pirouetting into IDM repetition.
Clocking in at under a minute, 'qrtz-fragment' is the record's shortest track but the closest Beedles comes to rhythmic cohesion, almost touching on Gábor Lázár or Rian Treanor's cybernetic recursions. He develops this further on the ace (but also brief) closer 'qrtz-numb onset', turning brushed aluminum kicks into slinky android breaths that tear the dancefloor into a honeycomb of gaping wormholes. Well good.
June 24, 2022