There’s something remarkably alluring about Curtis Crayon’s brand of electronic minimalism. Tracks are built on single note synth riffs with movement created through the dialling of filters and reverb levels. Sometimes other single synth chords might strain in the background, or single percussion hits flash across the spectrum, at others it is pure, stark, monophony. Yet this could never be really considered ambience, there’s far too much rhythm for that. Opener ‘Ejection’ is a case in point. Every peak and dip of the sine-wave is audible, and it is the ever shifting processing applied to that wave which make it captivating. Harsh edges are applied through distortion, filters bring out the bottom end, then thin it right down to a trebly pulse. Likewise, ‘The Delicious Tremors’ evokes some sort of digital majesty across 9 minutes of a single sound ebbing and flowing rhythmically. Harmonic overtones are extracted and added to the sound in order to create a very rich timbre. ‘Sole Star’ approaches more traditional ambient terrain with washes of Vangelis like analogue synth. ‘Seed’ is one of the few tracks with any sort of melodic movement, if a single arpeggiated riff can be considered melodic – again, the effects of Crayon manually turning his synth’s various pots and controllers is what holds interest.
It’s not until the final track, ‘Staring Through The Flower’, that any traditional sense of mixing rhythm, melody and harmony into one piece of music is utilised. The release this gives after the tension built by the previous 8 tracks of stark beauty is almost physical. This is music that is extreme in one sense, in that it is focused on subtle tone shifts of individual, synthetic sounds. Yet it is remarkably listenable, with a warmth that denies its machine origins. It’s like Crayon has taken electronic music full cycle back to its 1950s academic roots, with the minimal sound and structural palettes that entailed, but brings to this the decades of knowledge of how to make machine music fundamentally human. It’s a beautiful album.
Adrian Elmer
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