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Jeff Carey, "Impulse"
This is the kind of music that makes my brain feel like it is chewing itself. The five short works here act as a kind of clearing house for my mind; listening enforces defragmentation. These works act like miniature vacuum cleaners, erasing all the info-garbage that tends to accumulate after a few uninterrupted hours of total media immersion. Visceral and cacophonous it reminds me I have a body. Listening to noise is healthy.
I tend to think of noise in magickal terms: it performs the same kind of psychic function as a banishing ritual does, cleansing the area in which it is played, or the mind of the person who plays or listens to it. I’m not suggesting that Jeff Carey subscribes to this viewpoint, but these are the types of experiences I am in search of when listening to the style. The noise I enjoy also has an ecstatic quality, putting me back in touch with my body. This is especially important to me as I am a writer who works in a library, and with the vast swathes of information and media at my disposal it is easy to get stuck in my head. Meditation is good for calming the mind, but noise cuts to the chase and silences my thoughts for me.
This EP does all of this for me in a way that is quick and succinct. Recorded live and direct-to-disc without overdubs it captures the immediacy of his electro-instrumental style. As an electronic musician who is dedicated to performance, Jeff Carey creates his own software and gear allowing him to control all parameters of composition in real time. The sounds themselves do not belie their construction, and they seem as if they were perfected in a hermetically sealed chamber. While clearly digital the songs are muscular and vigorous.
"Ctrl" opens the disc with a fluttering of gelatinous flubber, interspersed with quick squelches, clicks, clacks, and mechanical clucks. "Mod" seems to use more ring modulation, lending pleasant glissando and resonance to the signals. "Freq" is quieter, focusing in on static. It moves along like soft stream of gently attenuated and polished white noise. While all the material is highly abstract "Trig" is also the most dissonant. Scraping sounds, akin to bowed metal, zoom alongside the prominent percussive blasts that give the song its meat. The disc ends about twenty minutes after it starts, making this a perfect listen for when I need to quiet the caterwauling of my mind. That external noise can create internal silence is an essential paradox of this music.
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