Almark Thaolen's music tends to ascend with suspicion, with a keen acknowledgment of the world around him, inspecting its benefits, flaws and projected hypocrisies.
I recently delved into his grand opus, -ATD-, which made the rounds from 2013-2014. It captures all of the above and then some, in an imaginative rundown of mechanical sounds that flow from pure, "retro" stylings. (In other words, its audio development reaches back to look forward, its journey shuffled by collocating extremes.)
"32-Bit" opens the opus: a vibrating piece that taps Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, though for a dystopic age. It's a preluding bit of doom (filtered through 1980s glitz), setting one before a succession of profound insight and romanticized chance.
"Flip-Flop" is the next to emerge, emulating the voice of a two-faced politician. On occasion, it sparks a path of promise, a showering of golden-age optimism, but just as fast turns the tables with a lie, pressing one to question the self-evident hows and whys.
"High Bias" is the subsequent, Big Brother tangent, where the media supplies each and every answer. Its sounds whip like a Devo-ish cipher on Valium, like keys tapped upon one's brain, lining one's mind with information that one never wants or needs, but what the heck. They claim the results do please.
"Magnetic Poles" adds a cosmic quality to the latter's citation, subduing one from both antithetical ends. The notes jump and skip, rise and fall, directing one's thoughts in the most benumbing way.
"Digital Mountains" evokes a possible refuge, though more fabricated than real. Almark's swagger is slow and cautious in this instance, tempting yet forbidding, creating a hope that's more hopeless than not.
"Binary Fathoms" pulls a tad from the despair. Like "Digital Mountains," it's also slow and cautious, but more data-driven as it descends. It echoes like the whirring guts of a monstrous computer, thickened by corridors of intertwining circuitry. One pushes through it, lost but no less resolved.
"Wow-and-Flutter" gets exotic, with its New Age, Middle Eastern groove. It seduces like a belly dancer, prancing atop the wavering sea. If only one could stay within its vast, buckling trance, but alas, one has no choice but to stream, returning where one was never meant to be.
Perhaps, if one's lucky, "Captain Capstan" will intercede. His song is strong, but his ability to loosen one's shackles is at best shaky, his steps strewn and discordant. He grows spectral inside the dissension, and though a dial tone hopes to arbitrate, the great hero floats away.
Fortunately, "IC" fills his space, happy and eventful in its electronic cloak, racing one through the coordinated conduits, if not back to joy, then at least away from displeasure, so smooth and dreamy, so warm and creamy, until ...
"Tape Head" unspools. Its gloom is strong, forcing one toward square one, to re-question one's fate, as well as one's most innate beliefs, but the crescendo builds only commination, recording one's every miscalculated move.
In the hands of "-ATD-," one slips into the long-awaited metropolis, the brain center of all brain centers, where the wired eyes scrutinize, prod and demean. One kisses a fierce, opposing force, but the robotic noise, the simulated, wall of suffocation, denotes a precise judgment and with it, a dire departure.
"Carrier FM" seals the predicament, invoking something old-school through its jazzy ride. It makes one want to dance, and one does so in one's mind, but only per bureaucratic approval, which imprints and re-records without completion. This old-school dance is forever, as is its modern subjugation.
Almark amends his tracks with diverting remixes of "Tape Head" (subtitled "rephrase," "dirty head mix" and "one half mix") "High Bias" (per "chirp mix") and "Wow-and Flutter" (per "tape speed mix"). The variances are subtle but defining: an entertaining way to reimagine the established, album arrangement.
Overall, -ATD- is an illuminating, electronic trip, played for sheer elucidation, though always bound to those damned, (un)foreseen things we never evade.
Experience -ATD- at
https://synthoelectro.bandcamp.com/album/atd-4
and enjoy the masterful, nature-steered "Wow-and-Flutter" video at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjVim_zl7QI
https://vimeo.com/groups/496993/videos/95705539
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