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Richard Devine, "Asect:Dsect"
Short attention span theater for the sound design set.
Asphodel
If you haven't heard any of Richard Devine's recorded output up to now, this album is a great place to jump on. Devine has always pushed the envelope of what his tools can do, and with Asect:Dsect we are treated to a version of Devine as mad tinkerer that remains interesting on successive listens the way that some other DSP records do not. Devine's previous outings Lipswitch and Aleamapper visited the extremes of his take on music. The former was a million-mile an hour beat and squiggle fest that was notably absent of a center reference point; a soundtrack for ADD if ever there was one. By contrast, the latter was an exercise in micro-detail exploding out into vast expanses of reverb that demonstrated that there was more to the reigning king of DSP than wonky beats and 128th note programming. With Asect:Dsect, Devine has managed to bring the best elements of those previous records together in a way that is both more accessible and more carefully exploratory at the same time. It's easy to imagine the harsh and often mechanical rhythms that Devine eeks out as simply the music made by machines with Devine at the helm, trying to keep up. But in reality, though his soundscapes and polyrhythms are impossibly inhuman, machines would never make music this confounding. Machines don't take chances, but Devine does and Asect:Dsect is full of imaginative bursts that betray their digital genesis. This is futurism in one of the only ways that it can still be realized in a post-modern world. It's data-rich, full of leaping off points and connecting nodes that take one idea leap over two or three more, and return the listener to the start with a new sense of the territory waiting to be explored. Anyone who has ever clicked through link after link on the web and wound up on a site so arcane that it seems as though it must exist outside the network will understand the kind of journey that Devine is on here. Not every path is a complete success, and in places the experimentation bogs down the beats and synths with a feeling of sensory overload that works against the grain. But most of the time, the songs serve as little soundtracks for synapses firing that even those uninitiated to the world of powerbook rock will understand. There are even moments here that are beautiful, sparse, or understated--three adjecties not usually associated with Devine's brand of electronica. By the album's closer, the tempo has dropped, the melodies have bubbled up to the fore, and the percussion that previously ricocheted as though it were recorded inside a hypercube has settled down to a slow and steady head-nodding groove. Devine's greatest accomplishment with Asect:Dsect is not the volume of plug-ins used or the much-touted 24 bit 96khz production value, but the greater sense of musicality he has brought to game. We are used to classical music that strives to capture a place or time in history through the orchestration of sound, and Devine is working squarely in that tradition. The trick is that he's realized the perfect soundtrack to a time we haven't yet experienced, a futurist fresco of sorts, and diving into that can be confusing to say the least. Everyone should have at least one Richard Devine album to experience the far reaches of sound design at the juncture of human creativity and enabling technology. If you are going to get just one Devine record, make it this one (for now).
If you haven't heard any of Richard Devine's recorded output up to now, this album is a great place to jump on. Devine has always pushed the envelope of what his tools can do, and with Asect:Dsect we are treated to a version of Devine as mad tinkerer that remains interesting on successive listens the way that some other DSP records do not. Devine's previous outings Lipswitch and Aleamapper visited the extremes of his take on music. The former was a million-mile an hour beat and squiggle fest that was notably absent of a center reference point; a soundtrack for ADD if ever there was one. By contrast, the latter was an exercise in micro-detail exploding out into vast expanses of reverb that demonstrated that there was more to the reigning king of DSP than wonky beats and 128th note programming. With Asect:Dsect, Devine has managed to bring the best elements of those previous records together in a way that is both more accessible and more carefully exploratory at the same time. It's easy to imagine the harsh and often mechanical rhythms that Devine eeks out as simply the music made by machines with Devine at the helm, trying to keep up. But in reality, though his soundscapes and polyrhythms are impossibly inhuman, machines would never make music this confounding. Machines don't take chances, but Devine does and Asect:Dsect is full of imaginative bursts that betray their digital genesis. This is futurism in one of the only ways that it can still be realized in a post-modern world. It's data-rich, full of leaping off points and connecting nodes that take one idea leap over two or three more, and return the listener to the start with a new sense of the territory waiting to be explored. Anyone who has ever clicked through link after link on the web and wound up on a site so arcane that it seems as though it must exist outside the network will understand the kind of journey that Devine is on here. Not every path is a complete success, and in places the experimentation bogs down the beats and synths with a feeling of sensory overload that works against the grain. But most of the time, the songs serve as little soundtracks for synapses firing that even those uninitiated to the world of powerbook rock will understand. There are even moments here that are beautiful, sparse, or understated--three adjecties not usually associated with Devine's brand of electronica. By the album's closer, the tempo has dropped, the melodies have bubbled up to the fore, and the percussion that previously ricocheted as though it were recorded inside a hypercube has settled down to a slow and steady head-nodding groove. Devine's greatest accomplishment with Asect:Dsect is not the volume of plug-ins used or the much-touted 24 bit 96khz production value, but the greater sense of musicality he has brought to game. We are used to classical music that strives to capture a place or time in history through the orchestration of sound, and Devine is working squarely in that tradition. The trick is that he's realized the perfect soundtrack to a time we haven't yet experienced, a futurist fresco of sorts, and diving into that can be confusing to say the least. Everyone should have at least one Richard Devine album to experience the far reaches of sound design at the juncture of human creativity and enabling technology. If you are going to get just one Devine record, make it this one (for now).samples:
