Grant Beran – The Another One (Postmoderncore)

The bane of my existence – on weekdays, at least – is my little grey Phillips clock radio with a mono speaker blaring slightly out-of-focus music to arouse me from my slumber with a rude “WAKE UP!! IT’S TIME TO GET UP!!” Except pretend that I have a preternatural ability to decode music into a language. Although some people would say music is a language. Ahh, forget it…

Look, my point is that there’ a epoch of time between sleep and consciousness, when theta and alpha waves cause lucid dreaming and sometimes, when my clock radio goes off and I’m just quite not awake yet, the grainy crackle of the radio can pervade my sub-consciousness and I swear that when I’m playing in front of a full house at Acer Arena, FBi Radio is coming out of my amplifier. That fuzzy, semi-awareness of the music – that’s where Grant Beran’ record The Another One lives.

Perhaps a better, and less convoluted, reference would be that The Another One is reminiscent of when my love of music was still in its flirtatious period, and I would tape other cassettes that had most likely been copied from other cassettes, and the sound quality would be so shit that it was impossible to tell where Cobain’ feedback began or ended. That’ what The Another One sounds like, except replace “shit” with “awesome”.

Yes, it’s a funny little record; so lo-fi it’s no-fi. In the musique concrète tradition, Beran’ recording arsenal for The Another One consisted of a record player, second hand microphones and tape recorders. Think Philip Jeck or John Oswald making rave music for cyborgs and broadcasting it from the 1930s. Sometimes these anachronistic pieces of music (because it’s hard to call them songs) have a surprising synchronicity. Tracks like “Holler’ and “Film Score’ are what Endtroducing would have sounded like if Shadow had used a gramophone, the crackle of the record abundant while indistinguishable samples are sped up, slowed down, stopped, started and generally fucked with.

It’s hard to tell whether Beran’ planned any of this album or if it’s one giant anarchic recording session that’s accidentally fallen into place. There’ no real sense that Beran has even taken dynamics or texture into account. The music doesn’ evolve, it just is. But how or why he’ created it is irrelevant though. It’s a postmodern soundscape reveling in the joys of archaic music. It’s the soundtrack to your next dream.

Dom Alessio