With a name like Secret Circuit, it shouldn't be much of a surprise that the copious amounts of music that L.A.'s Eddie Ruscha, Jr. (yes, he is the progeny of the famed pop artist) has been cranking out in his home studio has not seen that much of California's legendary daylight. Ruscha's previous alternative rock band, Medicine, had spent a decade under-appreciated before getting some due this year with a Captured Tracks-pressed box set. And Ruscha's other notable project, the Laughing Light of Plenty (made with famed UK, SF, and NYC DJ Thomas Bullock), released one of 2008's Stone Rosiest dance singles, but then released a full-length album that I defy you to find, already deemed "lost" even though it dates from 2010. Almost all of Ruscha's music remains secret.
Soon after Medicine achieved mid-level grunge-era success (even landing a cameo in The Crow), Ruscha bowed out of rock altogether to dabble bedroom-woven electronica being crafted by the likes of Aphex Twin. It's that sort of Selected Ambient Works-worthy playfulness that comes to mind in sampling Tropical Psychedelics, released on England's finely attuned Emotional Response imprint. (Their reissue arm-- Emotional Rescue-- has also had a pretty decent year.) The album also caps Secret Circuit's rather overt 2012, wherein his quirky take on homespun electronic music began to gain more exposure via singles on the Beats in Space label and on Prins Thomas' Internasjonal.
Drawing on music dating back to when Ruscha first left Medicine (a quick scan of Secret Circuit's entry on Discogs reveals over a decade of self-released CDs and cassettes), this 12-track collection finds the music hard to peg to any particular era or trend. Analog components, modular synthesizers, and dusty drum machines underpin nearly every track. Opener "White Wish" has a winsome melody flutter about as a beat ticks underneath, but then a plucked nylon-string figure appears, replaced soon after by a warm'n'fuzzy psych guitar flare-up, before returning to its simple components. The cleverly named "Afrobotics" feels both primitive and futuristic, a roiling tom-tom getting topped with multiple layers of spy theme guitar, modular synth gurgles and squalls, even a dash of wordless vocals from Ruscha, the cumulative effect of all these overdubbed tracks never feeling cluttered.
The acoustic guitar foregrounded on "Moon Life" and the swirling noise interlude of "Angel's Eyes" nod back to 1996's Cosmic Sword #1, while the piano recital-meets-Conrad Schnitzler noise of "Psouvenirs" was available on Secret Circuit's 2010 Bandcamp album of the same name (another piano sketch, "Piano Waltz", has similar components). You can just make out that clatter and voices of children in the background of the former, suggesting a sketch rendered with the same sense of play. The most taut rhythm tracks appear on "Winded Up on the Floor" and "Lagoland", the former having the earmarks of early acid tracks while the latter features a buzzing kalimba lick that could come right off of a Congotronics album. Most of the album tracks are mindful to not wear out their welcome, with only three ventures beyond the four-minute mark.
Most of the album's pacing comes at a fugue-like, breezy speed, somewhere between the Balearic sensibilities of a new generation of producers (see the International Feel label and DJ Harvey's Sarcastic Study Masters) as well as the strange sort of punch-drunk exotica evoked by Yellow Magic Orchestra's Haroumi Hosono, with the casual sway of "Foggy Twilights" and "Walkin' on Water" conjuring island sunsets. Ruscha's curious sensibilities remain intact across Tropical Psychedelics, making the album an idiosyncratic yet satisfying listen. And with a new crop of L.A. producers like Suzanne Kraft, Pacific Horizons, and SFV Acid taking cues from Ruscha's peculiar soundworld, Secret Circuit may yet become overt.
