Let’s face it: most people just aren’t that into strictly drum-and-hat driven techno. By suffusing an otherwise innovative and rave-adjacent album with influences culled from deep within the mainstream, smart electronic artists like Moscow’s Pixelord can orangepill whole new generations of fans over to the dark side.
You know the production is good when you have to double-check that you are alone in the room, that no race of Borg has beamed itself into the closet and begun construction on a sophisticated communication system. Ecstatic impulses of joyous hardcore and old school rave flit in and out as spatial impulses connect at some rotational velocity with this newly constructed transceiver. It all sounds real and right there, hi-fi to an alarming degree on a good set of speakers. Pixelord’s snare-kick combos (like on “Gene”) hit with an elastic veracity not achieved since Sophie (God rest her soul) was making music on this astral plane.
On “NFT Acid” and “Tron,” there’s just enough euphoric trance energy to throttle the underlying breakbeat into something nearly beatific. Toeing the line between nostalgia and innovation is a real sweet spot for dance music, and the hairpin turns from Bonzai-style mega rave oblivion to glitchy bedroom hyper-pop. It makes genre identification feel like a kind of antediluvian ornithology, and good riddance! Kids these days just don’t care. (Sidebar: some of this could really do numbers on TikTok as a backing track to Gen-Z videos showcasing SFX makeup or unsolved mysteries).
There are also nice moments of modular, Laurie Speigel-in-space-esque quietus, like the whole album is a carefully plotted nightlong DJ set. Take “Hashtag,” for example, which flips an arguably overused EDM-type autotuned vocal semivowel into something fresh with gleaming modular-sounding hi-beams.
Vaporwavey synths that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Crystal Castles cut mingle with heavily reverb’d electric guitar for a nostalgic nineties-via-Tumblresque interlude. Predawn, airy jungle influence is replaced by a fatly saturated flanging baseline. The constant morphogenesis as one kind of song becomes something completely different, while maintaining some recognizable structural integrity, is what keeps these instantly recognizable influences fresh. There’s even a trap and pop influenced track with vocals from blaze.zip that would hit the spot for any intoxicated freshman at Arizona State mourning a procession of destroyed loves.
There are a lot of people from different walks of life, with different ideas about what constitutes good music, who could foreseeably enjoy something or everything on this record.
-Winston Mann
Link – Bandcamp
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