This is both the inaugural release for Becker’s Clunk label and his first new album in nearly a decade, but it stylistically picks up roughly where his brilliantly demented Traditional Music of Notional Species series left off (grotesquely gnarled and squirming synth hallucinations beamed in from an alien jungle). Intended as a “labyrinthine four-chapter pseudo-musical that reflects the flustering absurdity of the current era,” The Incident feels like the fruit of a Lovecraftian scenario in which Becker is plagued by recurring nightmares of an otherworldly city populated by slime-covered and tentacled horrors and wakes up each morning with a fresh batch of disturbing field recordings documenting his extradimensional travels.
Characteristically, the primary allure here is that Becker conjured up some truly ungodly sounds, as it sounds like he circuit-bent a modular synth to make everything sound as viscerally slithering, gibbering, and gelatinous as possible. Notably, he also happens to be one of the greatest mastering engineers on the planet, which further helped shape this album into an immersive headphone mindfuck par excellence. That said, there has also been some compelling evolution since Notional Species II, as Becker now seems to play with spatial dynamics a bit more and also seems to have picked up a fresh gamelan influence. The more gamelan-inspired pieces all fall on the second half of the album (“stunde null,” “sāʿatu alṣṣufri,” and a “puttering purgation”) and every single one is a highlight evocative of a remote, ruined, and overgrown jungle temple where something ineffably ghastly and otherworldly has just been summoned.
Of the three, “sāʿatu alṣṣufri” is the most strikingly novel, as the metallic percussion and vaguely Middle Eastern-sounding snatches of melody give it the feel of a ritualistic procession and Becker works some truly impressive magic in his gleeful distortion of the metal sounds. The closing epic “what really happened” is the album’s zenith, however, as it opens with a motif akin to a small jazz ensemble that is time-stopped and glitching out within the creaking timbers of a collapsing building, then builds into an incredibly dense, undulating, and all-engulfing maelstrom of smeared drones. Despite that, it still somehow feels weirdly meditative and thoughtfully composed, which is quite an impressive feat given the sheer derangement and alien nature of the sounds themselves. Notably, this album is billed as a precursor to a new series of works entitled “based on a true story,” so I am eagerly looking forward to an expansion of this world into further vistas resembling an alien body horror soundtrack performed exclusively using disturbingly misused balloons. In the meantime, The Incident unquestionably keeps Becker’s unbroken streak of boldly unique and wildly creative sound art masterpieces fully intact.
