An exercise in brashly ornate modernism, maybe, Alexander Gladun bounces between beats like a rubber ball as he giddily twines dubbed distortion, maimed fairground music, and erratic tape loops into a dense miasma of swirling sounds which leaves the listener nearly gasping for breath at the audacity of it all. The high density, rich textured music, though clearly in the vein of Kid 606 and their ilk, is often powerfully uninhibited. As on pieces such as ‘Visual Surrounding’, Gladun carefully sculpts these sounds and arranges them in intriguing ways.
It is not something that Gladun is able to maintain throughout, though, as a handful of pieces get too bogged down in clunky, oftentimes dull 4/4 beats. Yet, for all that, certain other passages assert themselves enough to balance out the scales. ‘The Way To The Sun’, for one, with its bass drum booms strung along a line of rapid, skittering digital bleeps, is a fine raw cut and splice piece; while ‘Roman Kosh’, in the way its relentless swell, is unexpectedly sensual; ‘Mishush’, meanwhile, is just impulsive and, with its dewy keyboard melody beating against the angular polyrhythm, expressive enough to afford it body and soul.
Indeed, asides from the tangible energy of some of the works, it is the beauty of the looped melodies and the way they hang heavy in the vibrating air of all these electronic musical fibers that enables this recording to enjoy some manner of achievement. Gladun displays a certain strategy, too, balancing percussive weight and burrowing melodic hooks on certain tracks, while also allowing the former to outdo the latter and vice versa. Despite the fact that certain moments may simply strike at prosaically ecstatic results, then, others establish a delightfully knotty web of allusion.
Max Schaefer
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