Follow up to Helicon2, released on Detroit Underground.
The album is mostly a synthesis of the experimental composition
and processing techniques started for the Aero album and the playful,
melody-centric voice leading found in the lazer.eyes.love album.
The Helicon series explores the body<->sound relationship. While contextually rooted in club music, compositionally all songs are based around various techniques to interact with sound in real-time. The series is, quasi, my playground to explore and discover new methods while the “club music” & real-time control impose contraints and limitations on the compositional form. Helicon1 approached this search more conventionally with hardware modular synth patches generating multi-track audio and simple patch parameterizations that are controlled for the recording. Helicon2 forgoes this and instead shifted towards more broadband and high-frequency control data based on accelerometer sensors/multi-touch input/… to control DSP. Afterwards, cross-modulation techniques have been employed, even for the mix-down, to give the compositional elements the opportunity to interact or react, thus extending the organic flow of the composition.
LODSB (aka Niklas Klügel), follows-up Helicon 1 (Retort, 2014), with Detroit Underground. A myriad of dislocated electrical bits are tossed in the air, once again, this time landing in rhythmical formation. Not entirely dance-floor centered, except “Malefizische Maschinenelenktik,” Helicon 2, is mind-numbing experimentalism at its best. Disjointed sonic slabs are dissected and assimilated to no end, its Autechrean landscape is asymmetric beauty. Take “Vexiertes Gestaltpathogen” and its digitized ebb and flow, strained glitch, and fractal beatwork as LODSB’s mission is to tangle and confuse blissfully. Elsewhere, alien sounds mingle with Subotnick precision, piano elements, and a sense of order (ie. “Kognitiver Quecksilbersee der Meinigkeit.”) On “Indifferentes transkraniales Yogakalkül,” a classic Brothomstates / Phoenecia sound escapes time—head-funk at its finest, goosebumps at full speed, this is LODSB at his best. In summary, Helicon 2 is a ravished manifest that sways back and forth between extreme glitch extracts and atmospheric brilliance. igloomag
[..] It’s one of the few albums [...] that actually feels interrelated, that there’s a kind of order and progression and logic that would be irreparably harmed if taken out of order or sold separately. The rough and dark and lethal-edged ambient sounds of track one (they all have names that for all I know could mean something but look like a parody of complex German word constructions) coalesces 11 minutes later, the chaos coming together however briefly into a kind of “song.” Burial does this, Yoshinori Hayashi does this but few others have the vision or patience to do it well. By Track 5, things have fallen apart and reordered again. Listening to this album feels like it should be accompanied visually by a map presenting the development of civilization over an enormous timescale, from formation to construction to expansion to destruction and back again. That’s one metaphor, I guess, and probably not the subtle logic behind Helicon 2 but you’re welcome to go where it leads you. 5mag
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