Brian Foote and Paul Dickow began recording their album High Cube with a few strict constraints: one hour to make each track, just five instruments, a “total ban on overthinking.” In less capable hands, the prompt could’ve overwhelmed the process; one can easily imagine a YouTube stream where an enterprising young system-gamer tries to make something listenable in an hour while the clock ticks away in the corner of the screen. Yet Foote and Dickow are content to let the weird, spiky thing they’ve created speak for itself. For these two IDM vets, the prompt is mostly useful in allowing them to shove aside trivial questions about what a track is “about,” or what genre it belongs to, in order to splatter raw sound on tape.
Foote and Dickow have been collaborators for nearly three decades, playing together in Rex Ritter’s post-Jessamine band Fontanelle and the Portland post-rock band Nudge. Foote records as Leech, runs the great Peak Oil label, and is general manager of the storied Kranky, while Dickow has amassed a vast catalog of brittle yet voluptuous electronic music as Strategy. This is their first album as a duo, and it could’ve been recorded and released at any point in their collaboration. Ten years ago, it might’ve stood alongside the balmy, choppy house music being released on Pacific Northwest labels like Mood Hut and 1080p, while 10 years before that it could’ve slotted easily alongside the “unknown, silly, fun, outrageous, cheap dance music” Dickow cut his teeth spinning at Portland venues like Holocene and Ground Kontrol.
These six tracks, totaling just a hair over a half hour, are totally devoid of negative space or dynamic range. The musicians presumably had to rely heavily on loops in order to finish their tracks before the buzzer went off, and something is always slamming, scratching, or puttering away in the background. Mechanical hand drums subtly reinforce the connection between this music and what a group of inspired stoners might be able to achieve with acoustic guitars and a set of bongos. Thick, swooning chords perfume the foreground on “Ofid+wor” and “Volcano Snail,” but they never settle; instead, the movement of the producers’ hands on the knobs is audible as they twist the chords in and out of ear-piercing patches of resonance.
The result is one of the sourest, stiffest, strangest-sounding hangout albums ever recorded. At its best, it sounds like a ’90s Apollo Records ambient-house longplayer impregnated with weed smoke, working simultaneously from the intractable computer logic of vintage IDM and the loose rules of a jam session. The sound quality is never quite lo-fi, but it has a sun-fried patina, as if the master tapes were left to sit a little too long. And though there are moments where decisions seem to have been made hastily, as when the audio fades out abruptly on “Underwater Welders,” there’s enough going on in any individual track to make it hard to believe any one of them could be completed in just an hour. Three hours, maybe.
