ROD MODELL
Incense & Black Light
PLOP3
Plop 2008
10Tracks. 57mins57secs.

With Incense & Black Light, Detroit-based minimal techno producer and Deepchord Records manager Rod Modell has produced a work more unseemly than probably even he realizes. While Modell’s early work was concerned with electro-acoustic experimentation, he’s since entertained cinematic space-out fancies and, more recently, beat-oriented music lined with traces of both dub and house. This album, his most coherent and effective, is thus a jarring but delightful collision of influences and inspirations.

The tracks display a furrowed brow focus on a particular sort of hunched, anxious groove, one caught between dub’s half-time skank and techno’s blithe forward motion. Modell then folds into this a welter of hiss and scratchy, gunmetal grey textures, punctured sensually by echoplexed horns and yellowing dub bassline frequencies.

After the spray of technicolor energy provided by the first few beat-oriented tracks, positively alive with jumpcuts and snarled-up accumulations of noise, the album slowly comes to rest in subdued throbbing and eerie muffled discharges of sound, which give a vivid impression of what a life spent in close proximity to power lines street cars must be like.

Modell apparently recorded and reconstructed the material of this album during the middle of the night, and this seeps through the pores of the music’s mood and manner. In its mimicry of city-life, with its daily rhythm and hum of machinery, the album is more physical than mystical, but Modell manages to find the latter in his source sounds with surprising frequency. All of this makes Incense & Black Light a rootless signifier of twenty-first century urbanity.

4.3/5

Plod
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