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Resina, "Opinio Omnium"

Mousike Lab
Resina is the cooperative effort of Retina.it and Marco Messina, twowell-known electronic-based entities who experiment with a multitude ofstyles and themes in achieving their unique brands of glitch music. AsResina, they manage structures that may be complicated and not whollyelectronic — as they pass all their scrambings through analog equipmentduring recording/assembly — but they are ultimately conventional andvaguely uninteresting. Not to belittle the effort or the final producttoo much, but these songs work from the same canvas and paints with nottoo much variety, which makes for a static listening experience thatcould be better spent on more challenging fare. If there are differentthemes to these songs, I missed them, as they all sound remarkablysimilar. It seems like too many electronic artists concentrate on onlythe aesthetic of the contrivance instead of on melody and the songitself. Resina do some things extremely well: beat structure and fulluse of all frequencies; layered sound effects and the odd sample thrownin; working from one point and building to another in a predictable butstill non-jarring way. All things considered, though, once you've heardone track you've heard them all. Similar computerized beats continuethroughout the album, almost to the point where on the first listen Icould predict where the beat/song would go next, like a clarivoyantconductor of a synthetic orchestra. There's a wealth of experience withResina, that much is clear, and having never heard the personnelinvolved I can't relate this to their other works. But I think at thisstage they'd have learned there's more to electronic music than this.

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