Architect - I Went Out Shopping To Get Some Noise
Daniel Myer is a busy lad, putting out a broad range of electronic material under a number of aliases, though he is probably best known for his work in his post-industrial future-pop inflected guise of Haujobb. One of his secrets has been Galactic Supermarket, the previous record released in his Architect guise. Galactic Supermarket was a streamlined fusion of ambience and beats, a slick glittering construct that sailed silently between the stars. Myer returns to I Went Out Shopping To Get Some Noise and, while he brings the echo of solar flares and space wind back with him, he's also found a string quartet and a forgotten cache of recorded voices.
Architect may be the realm of experimentation, the space where Myer dabbles with strange fusions and odd conglomerations. "Anger Management" works the space anthems, the sampled voices and the string quartets into a highly polished downtempo piece. In the future when anger will be managed through chemical reconfiguration and genetic alteration, this track will be the song inserted into your brain on a perpetual loop as a reward for good behavior. "Belgian Connection" stutters and hiccups with noise artifacts and glitches in the digital signal, but the core aesthetic remains future-glow downtempo as if the house band in the cyber-club of the 22nd century was a rhythm section of bruised machinery percolating retro-analog sounds as backup for an antique wood-grained radio cabinet which is still transmitting signals from the late 20th century.
"People forget that the brain is the biggest erogenous zone," a voice intones in "ICL Feelings," interrupting the shuffling, clattering dance floor breakdown that Myer has spun the record up to. This is machine sex music pumped directly into the eXistenZ input drilled into the base of your spine. "Colorado 6AM" kicks up dust on the empty highway as our vehicle flees before the spreading lambent glow of the sunrise behind us. Nothing out here in the high desert but the keening whistle of the desert wind, the repetitive whap-whap doppler sound of road markers streaming by, and the sub-sonic pop-pop of the last meteor storm dappling the fading blackness of sky's cupola.
"Unlike" is the burr of noise and the whispered voices of a schizophrenic's nocturnal chatter disturbing a melancholic string quartet. Myer layers unlikely elements together, whipping a line of Autechre-style machine crunching across a solitary piano melody (furthering, you know, the melancholia first introduced by the string section), while sustaining the impression that we're eavesdropping on an orchestral recital, sitting in the back row next to the geriatrics who can't keep their comments to themselves and a poorly maintained heating unit that is wheezing and leaking water on the floor. "Dievorce" stretches my favorite Tyler Durden speech from Fight Club across a bed of light-fingered beats and a hint of Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata," further dovetailing disparate elements in an amalgamation which lend credence to the argument that -- in the right proportions -- the sum is greater than the parts.
I Went Out Shopping To Get Some Noise makes me put the words futuristic, downtempo and drum 'n' bass in the same sentence with absolute no shame. While some of Myer's other projects haven't held my attention, his work as Architect continues to captivate, fascinating me as to how he manages to combine all of the oddly-shaped musical leitmotifs and genres into an engrossing cohesion. I want to go shopping with Myer, just to see what he puts in his cart.
music
The alphabetical list below provides navigation into the review archive. To view a comprehensive list of all reviews available in the repository, click on the infinity symbol (∞) in the last box of the series.
Regarding materials for review, I can be reached at:
music@markteppo.com
Links
Review Archive
| A | B | C | D |
| E | F | G | H |
| I | J | K | L |
| M | N | O | P |
| Q | R | S | T |
| U | V | W | X |
| Y | Z | # | ∞ |