The album's base notes will be familiar from his previous work; they consist of cool, frictionless pads, airy choral presets, and, especially, synthesized sounds that mimic acoustic instruments and revel in their own plasticity, like the tinny player piano of "Sticky Drama", or the jazz guitar noodling of "I Bite Through It". This time out, he ventures even deeper into the uncanny valley separating "real" sounds from mimetic ones. The references pile up in enormous slag heaps, and a few in particular stand out: the growls, chugging guitars, and blast beats of death metal; the flanged riffs of nu metal; and the garish synth stabs and grotesque vocal processing of contemporary commercial electronic music. Two years ago, after a bout of touring, he told Pitchfork, "I feel like I better understand the tropes and guises of EDM now," and you can hear that familiarity at various points in Garden of Delete.
Chris De Burgh Into The Light Full Album Zip
That's not to say the album is a collection of big-room bangers. But certain techniques common on the Electric Daisy circuit have wormed their way into the music: Elastic trance riffs, vertiginous glissandi that zip upward like space elevators, and, especially, the highly processed and contoured voices of which Skrillex is so fond. Nothing in G.o.D. follows the usual Pavlovian dictates of mainstream rave: There are builds and drops, but they're always deployed in ways that throw the listener off balance. Instead of EDM's predictable roller coaster, he's constructed something more like Monument Valley's non-Euclidean architecture, where 2D and 3D spaces collapse into one another, and trapdoors open at the turn of a hidden dial.
It all clicked for me one Sunday morning in the pre-dawn stillness of the city. Returning from seeing off a family member at the airport at an ungodly hour, I listened to G.o.D. on headphones for the duration of the ride back to the city center. Descending from the bus, I found myself standing in front of a Hard Rock Cafe where two enormous video screens flashed senselessly away above the sidewalk, their pixelated images moving almost in time with the album's throbbing synthesizers. As Lopatin's textures stretched and spasmed in my ears, artificial light poured out onto the empty street in ungainly bursts, like tiny droplets of the ongoing heat death of the universe. It was garish and gorgeous all at once, a vision of capitalism at its tackiest accompanied by a soundtrack at once cutting and strangely empathic, and for several minutes I just stood there, transfixed by the raw, oozing nowness of it all. 2ff7e9595c
Comments