Monday, April 21, 2025
THE SCHEME OF THINGS, BY ALMARK
After delving into Almark Thaolan's 2013 release, -ADT-, I was directed to another of his older, finer works: The Scheme of Things. From the 2016, track titles, I decided what to envision, and so for me, the opus became a wartime/war-torn stratagem, inspired by Almark's penchant for hidden meaning.
"Enter Tunnel" is the opening track, and an apt one at that, comparable to a Tangerine Dream selection. As such, it may have worked as an alternate placement for Michael Man/F. Paul Wilson's The Keep. It's catchy and foreshadowing, depicting an inward journey that heightens the senses, and among those senses, is fear.
"Oracle" holds a faster pace, drumming like a dance number, but with a New Age tingle that backs ancient and primal impulses. It's a brave, next step in a brash and dangerous campaign, and its offbeat, spellbinding charm is difficult to define, but once it enters one's ear, it doesn't let go. (Really, this one would work well as an opening-credits scroll for a chic, dystopic sojourn.)
"Parashoots" slips into something dreamier, with its spiraling backdrop and visiting dialogue, which bleeds from an adolescent, schoolyard fancy. In this respect, it conveys a loss of innocence (or an abandonment of a long endeared pastime) and the futile desperation to maintain it.
"U-235" twists the narrative onto a blithesome perch, but it's no less sorrowful in its undertone. It holds a John Carpenter avidity, the sort that might track Snake Plissken into urban hell. It also carries nuclear-equation/uranium-detailed utterances (in groove with its title), alluding to unavoidable calamity.
"Reconnaissance Missions" drops the stride, its dialogue referencing a HMS P38, spy run. The beat is jittery yet compact and analytical: an instructional passage that also proves haughty for all its outward confidence.
"A-Test" grabs the threading torch, using the famous, Emergency Broadcasting System edict, which summons nostalgia but also suspicion. A smacking, snapping, electronic current empowers its loop, stretching the surveying march: cool and breezy in a way, but like "Reconnaissance Missions," margined by threat.
"Silo" inflates the warning, crawling into a dark, missile-laden compartment, with a juddering tap that signals attack. Something is set to kill, and because of this, "Silo" may be the album's most unsettling sample, with a scrupulous progression that tastes (sounds) like bittersweet candy.
'' 'Aura' " lifts the disconcerting aspects higher, performing like a whistling rocket, hooked with a contemporary beat, building in eerie tiers, revitalizing the established, Tangerine Dream sweep (though caped by a soft, contemplative conclusion). The track's entirety totters between palpable gloom and inexplicable elation.
"The Sun was once Yellow" is the album's rubberiest submission, bouncing off an angelic, wall of sound (much like the uncanny sighing heard in the original Invaders from Mars). It recalls a time before the terror and destruction, but cradled by a steadfast, militaristic march that refuses retreat.
"Sub-23" is a boot-camp reflection to make one's subconscious all the stronger. It's a recalled preparation for fighting, for surviving, and by the track's end, one's belligerent focus is as fine-tuned as one can get.
"Echoes of Blue" holds a hurlyburly quality; not that it's fraught or tremulous, but rather that it creates a gradual apprehension. It connects to "The Sun was once Yellow," with an affecting voice that's odd yet terrestrial, dead yet alive, stirring the sort of harsh and surreal residue a soldier might face.
Almark follows "Echoes of Blue" with two remixes, one a "single cut" of "U-235," with the original's uranium tutorial resumed and accelerated. Then there's the "warm mix" of "Parashoots," which carries the original's lament, also quickened.
The album closes with the luminous "Plane Ride to London," which projects the peacefulness that follows an ordeal. It denotes a time of healing, daring to discard what once was. It reminds one that, in the vast scheme of things, all one consumed in the fairness of love and war is a distant memory, perhaps to be forgotten, perhaps to be embellished, but all the same, little more than a fragment of a dark and dire past.
Now prick up those ears and listen to one of Almark's expressed best:
https://synthoelectro.bandcamp.com/album/the-scheme-of-things
And while the opportunity is at hand, enjoy the album's sublime videos:
For " 'Aura' ":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-Dqj9ScRT8
For "A-Test":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8J5XYp4uhA
For "Oracle":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2ZQiBzO9wI
For "Elcaro" ("Oracle" in clever, audio/visual reverse):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AGHdEJKj5g&t=2s
Saturday, April 19, 2025
LARRY JOHNSON'S EYE
Artist Larry Johnson compiles another spectacular batch of his surrealistic (wordless) inclinations in Eye, compiled over a twenty-year period.
The 91-page, hardback edition is (as should come as no surprise to Johnson's followers) vibrant and varied (in other words, eye-catching), with its first half devoted to a retelling of Adam's creation (from a pale, dough-like entity to a veritable man), following his time with apple-enticing Eve in the Garden of Eden and thereafter, the emergence of humankind. There's also Adam's exciting epilogue, which unfolds with prehistoric proportions, featuring ravenous, giant behemoths, and a special, guest appearance by King Kong, which leads to Adam's ironic rebirth, captured (and conveyed) by God's vigilant eye.
The second half of the book caters to primitive, eye-oriented entities (wherein the eyes are, in fact, their sentient heads) and vast, eye-speckled surroundings, some in creamy color and others in elegant black-and-white. (Johnson's unique, organic flow characterizes each insertion, so that the reader will feel the spread of not only multiple orbs, but the creak of limbs and branches throughout every ornate frame.)
If one is a Johnson fan (or if one simply enjoys striking imagery), Eye is the volume to have. It's a source one will return to whenever the weight of monotonous reality grows too heavy.
Order Larry Johnson's provocative Eye at
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F2HGCQC5?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_asin_title
Friday, April 18, 2025
-ATD- BY ALMARK
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
AN ALTERNATE REALITY: I SAW THE ELECTRIC STATE
Netflix's The Electric State, directed by MCU's Anthony and Joe Russo and written by MCU's Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely (based on Simon Stalenhag's celebrated, illustrated novel), is an alternate-reality, science-fiction exploit. It takes place in a realm that spans the 1980s into the 1990s, where robots and humans have warred upon each other.
From the movie's prologue, we learn that robo-tech reached its dangerous heights in the '80s, with the "bots" disregarding Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics to rebel against their masters. As such, they neared victory, but the humans gained leverage by implanting their consciousnesses into lean, soldier machines, puppeteered from unseen locales. The human triumph, however, did not stem just from this precocious advantage; an ulterior motive was at play, one that would catapult minds in an altogether A.I. way.
It comes down to a young lady, Michelle Greene (Millie Bobby Brown), and her surrogate-brother bot, Kid Cosmo (Alan Tudyk) to unveil the secret. Cosmo, it turns out, holds a loose, symbiotic link to Michelle's younger brother, Christopher (Woody Norman), which was enacted by a scientist, Ethan Skate (Stanley Tucci), head of the once influential company, Sentre. Skate came upon the boy's extraordinary, cerebral capabilities, and has maintained the lad's comatose shell to initiate a global, virtual-reality stream: a symbiotic "paradise" where transmitted, pleasant thoughts rule the roost, but the concept is more indolent and self-serving than not.
On their path to retrieve Christopher, Michelle and Cosmo encounter a pair of roguish scavengers, John D. Keats (Chris Pratt) and his mechanical companion, Herman (voiced by Anthony Mackie and "costumed" by Martin Klebba), who after some reluctance, join the quest. This, in turn, leads the four into a bot haven called Blue Sky Acres Mall, and from there, the plot pivots into further peril and crucial revelations.
The characters who appear throughout this Oz-like journey are quite colorful: Marshall Bradbury (Giancarlo Esposito), the war's eclipsing hero, hired to hunt Michelle and Cosmo; Mr. Peanut (Woody Harrelson), the bots' wartime leader; Penny Pal (Jenny Slate), a post-office bot; Pop Fly (Brian Cox), a baseball bot; Perplexo (Hank Azaria), a magician bot; and Dr. Amherst (Ke Huy Quan), a friendly scientist with tenuous ties to Skate. Others round out the off-center ensemble, including Jason Alexander as Michelle's disagreeable, foster father.
The adventure is sprawling and uses aspects of other science-fiction stories for its various parts, including Surrogates; I, Robot; Short Circuit; *batteries not included; Ready Player One; Brainstorm; Heartbeeps; Strange Days; Terminator; Ghost in the Shell; Alita: Battle Angel; Frankenstein's Army; Mortal Engines; Star Trek Generations; Space Hunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone, and the '80s, Twilight Zone episode, "Dreams for Sale." The alluding hodgepodge is never too obvious and if detected, feels more like a sprinkling of inspiration than all-out plagiarism. (Heck, Star Wars: A New Hope and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow pulled the same stunt with little to no complaint.)
With the latter considered, Electric State can't be considered avant-garde. It simply rests on its war-torn and cheerful-looking backdrops, with sporadic references to pop-cultural items from its remade era. I've heard some complain about this, with one reviewer stating that, though Electric State may not be weighed by predictable "wokeness" (thank goodness, I agree), it's still unworthy of praise, since it never hits the provoking pinnacle it could have achieved. The complaint strikes me as odd, for not every movie will end up a Citizen Kane or Metropolis, no matter the ambition applied. Movies, for the most part, are designed to deliver escapism, and if they do so without a misinformed, prejudicial pitch, better that than not.
From my viewpoint, this one did its job, being happy, sad, scary, serious and silly all within its two-hour-plus running time: a meritorious accomplishment for any genre.
