AUTISTICI
Detached Metal Voice – Early Works Vol. 1
AB028
Audiobulb 2010
11 Tracks. 47mins58secs

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It’s barely been a few months since Autistici’s second album, Complex Tone Test, was released, yet here comes another collection of fine electronic music from David Newman, published on his excellent Audiobulb imprint. This time though, the album collates early recordings and brings a variety of experiments under one umbrella. No indication is given to when these tracks were recorded, but they are linked by a taste for retro-futuristic technologies, especially early voice synthesis experiments developed in the sixties and seventies in the US by the Bell Laboratories, an AT&T research site based in New Jersey, and old style electronic instrumentation.  

The album draws influences from far beyond the electronica realm, occasionally hinting at classical or jazz forms, yet the result is predominantly electronic and textural in aspect, using a vast array of glitches and sonic interferences at the core of each piece. This defines the record right from the opening track, On A Beach Of Pure Data, which kicks off with a constant discharge of electricity before getting into a mechanical groove, and continues to cast a shadow throughout the record. Things become a tad warmer on Colonic People thanks to a particularly effective jazz groove, nicely finished by sporadic lashes of rounded double bass, but the track is drowned in toxic layers of noise and reverb towards the end, and things are back to harsh metallic rhythmic patterns, sometimes tainted with ominous strips of ambient soundscapes (It Contains A Diagnosis, Beneath) at others left bare and dry (Ligaments, BlaK BloK).

On Babyman, Newman puts very human and real interactions and emotions into the imaginary mouths of computers to create a rather disturbing dystopian tale. Do robots dream of electric sheep? Who knows, but in the hands of Newman, computers seem capable of some sentiments, synthetic or otherwise. On Whispering Mongo Man, he puts the voice through a very different process. Using a John Lennon interview as primary source, but removing all traces of words spoken by the interviewee, retaining only his breathing, Newman totally obliterates the message, leaving the listener to imagine the missing content. Only vague pointers are thrown in with other ghostly processed voices to occasionally try to make sense, rather unsuccessfully it has to be said, of the lost discussion. Elsewhere, fragments of conversations find their way through the corrosive beats of It Contains A Diagnosis, while heavy breathing, at times unprocessed, at others distorted, give the already inhospitable They Move On Me a dark twist.

On the whole, Detached Metal Voice is a much more menacing and tensed collection than Autistici’s recent album, and while it is a less consistent record, due possibly to its tracks having been presumably recorded over a period of time, it is still a very fine collection of assertive electronica by a confident musician. If this record is anything to go by, another trip down the Autistic vaults of unreleased music is definitely something to look forward to: roll on volume two!

4.6/5

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Amazon UK: CD | DLD US: CD | DLD Boomkat: DLD iTunes: DLD