Beefcake - Coincidentia Oppositorum
Beefcake's second album for the Ant-Zen side label Hymen is sixteen unnamed tracks that veer from Italian opera to drifting soundscapes to hard drum 'n' bass to downtempo, pausing briefly at about every other genre along the way. It's not as much an unholy mess as you would imagine. In fact, the lads in Beefcake have actually managed to build a rather hypnotic album from this wide wash of musical nuggets.
Coincidentia Oppositorum begins with Italian opera heard over an old shortwave radio, music that is lost under the growing rush of a thousand moth wings. There are harsh breakbeat noises -- rhythms quite at home on the Ant-Zen label -- that turn into orchestral flourish taken directly from Craig Armstrong's work on the Plunkett & Macleane soundtrack. This, in turn, is skewed by digital fuckery as you would find on an Oval record. Soft piano lines drift over the distant roar of the ocean as if we've just skipped into the back row of John Tesh's Concert by the Sea. And then skipping again, we find ourselves deep in an IDM track that appears to be a lost outtake from Tri Repetae-era Autechre. An Enigma-esque dance number with laughing schoolchildren echoing in the background is brushed away again by harsh, scattered beats. And it all ends with a calming ballad.
All in all, Coincidentia Oppositorum is a soundtrack for the patients of the schizophrenia wing, meant to delight and soothe in the end. It's not the jarring world of sampledelica, but rather an adventure crafted with exquisite care to take you through the wide range of influence without a scratch. This is what Lewis Carroll would be doing if he were writing music in the 21st century instead of plunging down the rabbit hole in the latter part of the 19th.
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