On the Fish Touch EP, Moscow producer Alexey Devyanin, who records as Pixelord, mixes 8-bit Nintendo snippets into quivering dubstep beats. That's where he is on this record. But as we learned when we spoke to him for a piece last year on the current Moscow beat scene, Devyanin's output is wildly diverse and prolific. He has generated a substantial body of work in a short period of time as Pixelord, and his previous work as Gultskra explores a much different musical landscape. Under that alias, his sound was closer to early Fennesz or Gastr del Sol, heavy on field recordings and abstraction. So he's fairly steeped in experimentation.
On Fish Touch, which puts four original tracks alongside three remixes from other artists, Devyanin displays meticulous arrangement skills, without which these familiar rhythms could be easily brushed off as mere copycatting. The stutter of UK garage artists like El-B and the ghosted vocal samples of Burial have been explored thoroughly in the past several years, with varying degrees of success. What Devyanin brings to the table is restraint combined with an eagerness to blur the trappings of all these genres; his use of video game sounds adds a childlike sensibility that allows these songs to be at once ominous and mischievous. But there's a certain amount of coldness that is inevitable in his music, which is so heavy on cultural references both literal and figurative. And that chill can be a bit confusing, because even when there is harmonic movement and melodic development, it's not clear what sort of emotion is being channeled beyond giddy thrill.
With its maddening hi-hat/kick drum interplay, "Kiss Your TV" throws down the gauntlet: Listeners have to make their way through noisy shards of glitch that cradle vocal samples from Lady Gaga and snippets of Russian dialogue about houseguests, while the bass gets buried in echo. The hyperactive arpeggios of "Cybernator" give way to an 8-bit blip solo bookended by G-funk synths and decaying reverb, and when a surprisingly bright bridge emerges, it's only for a few bars. The drums here knock as tightly as a good hip-hop track should, and without vocals, something needs to speak. But what's being said is not always clear.
The schizophrenia inherent in the four originals gets cleared on some of the remixes. Britain's Om Unit reworks "Cybernator" by picking up the pace with some electro drums, layering those arpeggios over a much sparer template. Instead of squelchy interjections between bars, there's room for the beat to spread out, making the hook from the original feel fresher. The title track gets updated in two different ways; the better of these finds KidKanevil dropping a slowed-down Rick Ross vocal over a simpler beat that fixes Devyanin's bassline into a more traditional pattern. Here the squelchy descending pattern becomes more "put your hands up" and less "stroke your chin," and in this context that's a good thing. Pixelord has obviously spent some time sharpening these tools, but at times, this is a frustrating release, hovering between house-party bangers and introspective bass worship. Still, as the limits of quantized beats get continuously stretched and mutated, it's fascinating to enter the mind of a producer who doesn't hear the usual limitations and is willing to let his music travel in any number of directions.
