ANDREW PEKLER

New Environments & Rhythm Studies

Genre: MODERN CLASSICAL / AMBIENT

LP (Black Vinyl)

Boomkat Product Review:

Returning to Jan Jelinek's Faitiche label, Andrew Pekler follows the fantasy ethnomusicology of his milestone 'Tristes Tropiques' and 'Sounds from Phantom Islands' LPs, creating psychedelic bio-electronic atmospheres from synthetic field recordings, cock-eyed library/exotica polyrhythms and GRM-warped textures.

When Pekler put together 2016's 'Tristes Tropiques', he scoured Claude Lévi-Strauss's melancholy, critical ethnography-cum-biography, wondering how music might be used to achieve similar artistic and political goals. Looking to 1950s and '60s exotica, a post-colonial hangover of its own that Pekler admits had "ruined" his listening by being so foundational, he made this the jumping-off point for a sequence of fantastical, speculative pan-global soundscapes. Pekler composed music for a non-place, subverting the logic of rootless "world music" to dream up a Fourth World that exists in the collective memory alone. And the concept was deepened on 'Sounds from Phantom Islands', the accompaniment to an "online interactive map" that exhumed ghosts of the age of exploration. Six years later, he's back exploring similar haunted territory with 'New Environments & Rhythm Studies', figuring out a heady response to the beloved early electronic library records and quirky electro-acoustic private press editions that still provide the underground with so much juice.

To mix things up this time around, Pekler alternates between brief "rhythm study" tracks, where he riffs on the blippy, syncable sketches made by artists like Delia Derbyshire and Raymond Scott in the '50s, and longer, more atmospheric illusions that toss between synthetic and organic sounds. Dazzlingly well conceptualised, it's an album that feels as if it's locked onto a historical track, using our understanding of that history to make astute asides and relavent commentaries. Pekler references the past with his chewy studies, but isn't interested in making literal era-specific reworks; his set of experiments are way more open ended and much more psychoactive, fractalising each protruding edge and upsetting the pulses with saturation and white noise. Skip to 'Rhythm Study 3' and you'll be able to figure out what he's up to, mangling woody ritualistic rhythms with careful electronic processes to end up with an aqueous sci-fi dub experiment that's not more than a few nodes from Vladislav Delay. And each sketch sounds as if it's dissolving a little more: 'Rhythm Study 5' is a muted, off-balance bubbler with scuttled kicks and damaged glock knocks, and 'Rhythm Study 6' sounds like the same thing scrubbed backwards over battered tape heads, dissociated and contorted for peak hypnotic effect.

Cleverly, Pekler runs this story in parallel with a main narrative that's clear as day on 'Globestructures'. It's the interaction between electronic and organic that's interesting here, and we're not completely sure what's what. Pekler's eager for us to wonder what it is we're listening to: if we're hearing crickets or birdsong, might it be synthesized modular beeps or chirping oscillators? Similarly, the drums may or may not be "real"; Pekler gives each element the same coating of topsoil, making sure it's strenuous for us to figure out the truth. But isn't that the point? Pekler's point is to strong-arm a kind of critical, active listening. And as Lévi-Strauss juxtaposed criticism of earlier ethnography with his own real-life accounts and experiences, Pekler suggests a related back-and-forth, presenting his influences and his own thoughtful reactions. Even when we hear the ephemeral beat skits, we can track the same thought process, making a developed, widescreen moment like 'Cumbia Para Los Grillos', a swooning stack of cadenced polyrhythms and equatorial riffs, all the more hard-hitting.

LP (Black Vinyl) (0)