Neuro… No Neuro is the alias of Tucson, Arizona based electronic producer and graphic designer Kirk Markarian, and this download-only debut album ‘The Edges Are All Wrong’ represents just one of two longplayers that he’s dropped on Audiobulb this month. Markarian describes the 19 tracks collected here (which frequently come across as brief vignettes, with many of them running at less than two minutes in length) as being derived from his experiences during and after several neurosurgeries and their various side-effects.
There’s certainly all manner of ASMR-inducing clicks, whirs and hums throughout these tracks, the results almost feeling like auditory hallucinations at points over a decent pair of headphones. For the most part, the predominant mood leans towards glitchy IDM and ambient, and it’s certainly not nearly as dark as you might expect. ‘We Touch Indiscriminately’ opens proceedings with a mistlike wash of static and delicately oulsating ambient chords, before glitchy clicks and cuts begin to pick at the base of the listener’s brainstem.
If anything, ‘Fine Powder’ makes the association with exploratory surgery even more explicit, the zapping tones that suddenly materialise in the foreground evoking the high pitched resonance of an MRI, while the sudden complete drop-out of the gauzy ambient background tones suggests audio cognition treacherously stuttering in and out.
Elsewhere, ‘Pulling The Cords Tighter’ ventures out into hyper detailed beat-driven IDM as spiralling gamelan-esque arpeggios ricochet back and forth against juddering electronics and skittering broken rhythms, before ‘A Moment In The Haze’ wanders out into gorgeously tranquil phased melodic pads, the spring-loaded, almost slow-motion trap beats that roll against them adding a sharp-focus edge to the shimmering textures. All up, this is an excellent debut album from Neuro… No Neuro that sees Markarian injecting plenty of freshness into the well-explored glitch / IDM genre.
