The ninth in the Ternesc Series from English DJ Blawan, Soft Waahls is a wonderful addition to his oeuvre of creepy, technical music; which sounds like an ultra high voltage seance conducted in a mad science lab.
One production layer seems always to defy another in this EP, (“Always say no”, a blown-out voice fittingly insists on the opening track), which leads to a certain neural confusion as you try to parse out which swaths of the spectrum are distorted and which are straining to articulate themselves. The compressed shakers and grimy basslines contradict high arps and momentary tonal shifts. True distinction is found in a surplus of small but mighty flourishes, especially in the first two tracks, startlingly pristine sounds in gaps of silence, well-engineered arpeggios of synth that might deserve an entire separate track, in a different genre, in the hands of another producer; but here, are only used once or twice and then never again.
Insectile mandibular clicks and buzzing of wings, the focusing of a compound eye, the deployment of digestive enzymes against the brain of an ant. It is necessary to access a world of nanoscale process through some sonic pareidolic third ear to get your bearings in the music, shrinking yourself as though with a ray-gun to some invertebrate cellular or molecular level of sound where no fully-formed auditory cortex has ever had the distinct pleasure to roam.
You can hear the great amperic buzzing as the main output jack of the synth scans frequencies, ricocheting off of the pass-bands of filters running on LFO’s with competing motives. The geeks among us would love to see this all at work, watch the patterns emerge as the Van de Graf generators spark discharge, but to simply sit back and listen is to hear a great producer explore new territory with the unbridled enthusiasm of a mad scientist discovering cold fusion in a Palo Alto garage. There’s a kind of super-electric heft to the slap of each kick and voltaic flanging spark of raw line noise in drag as a hi-hat, as if each instrument is hooked up to an operational amplifier supplying it with two-hundred volts of raw mainline power, and Blawan is the only thing standing between us and riding the lightning ourselves.
Blawan is great when he’s a bit creepy, (“Why They Hide Their Bodies Under My Garage?” being a great example). Tracks like “Fizz City” are as danceable as they are haunted by the eponymous “waahs;” through the ultralow, often vanishing kicks and zappy shakers emerge eerie howls and harmonies, like hearing a dead choir through sheets of white noise. The closer, “Micro 8’s,” manages to totally thwart any determination of underlying tempo through a complex deployment of percussion that batters like wasps on hot glass, it’s shot through with a creepy dissonant arrangement, leaving you as disoriented as you are delighted by the achievement.
-Winston Mann
Link – Bandcamp
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