0. Andrew Rohrmann once played in the Seattle indie band Hush Harbor, and the indie rocker's innate ardor for melody is hardwired into the laptop IDM he creates as Scientific American. Strong for the Future suggests an affinity for Dntel's choppy, hiccupping tunefulness and sonorous percussion, The Flaming Lips's emotive sweep, The Album Leaf's spangled serenity, and Prefuse 73's serrated hip-hop. This is a gently inexorable record that accumulates piece by crystalline piece.
1. "When it Was Ever Everything" clearly announces the record's intent: To tenderly envelop the listener in dappling clouds of lunar light, shot through with hot, sparking wires. A recursive circuit of sparse, plucked strings, muffled chimes, and sculpted waves of bass.
2. With its title track, the album rejects the impossibility of voice implied by the first song's amorphous void and opens its mouth to speak. Bootsy Holler's cherubic warbles diffuse across tidal glitch-pop that makes drums sing. Attention Lali Puna: The gauntlet has been thrown.
3. Once an indie dude, always an indie dude. "Drift in Place" features guest vocals from 764-Hero's John Atkins, who sounds more like Wayne Coyne than ever, chopped up amid Scientific American's medley of dewy, pointillistic indie electronica. Sublime.
4. "Victory Hold Still" gets back to the essence of composition, abstaining from embellishment in favor of denuded elegance. The drums spit like raindrops appearing on a sidewalk. A lonesome cascade of imbricate, synthetic strings carries the melody. A pleasant confection, if less ambitious than its forerunners.
5. After the lulling benevolence of "Victory Hold Still", it's doubly galvanizing when all hell breaks loose on "Between Urban Movements". Over a modulating EKG tone, crisp drums fall into rigid lockstep and you feel a freestyle coming on. Instead: a sampled belligerent voice diced into infinity. Crunkness ensues.
6. "Four Hour Window" slaloms and slithers with pickup like a sonofabitch, zero to max in six seconds flat. A superlative driving-at-night song, shifting fancily around the curves as streetlights roll over the windshield. Sveltely ominous.
7. "Your Utopia" : [UNTRANSLATABLE]. The immolated ghost of Ejak's voice commits unnatural atrocities amid a flurry of trembling binary code. Post-human.
8. Back on Earth, it's business as usual. "Million Lines (Slow Fade)" spreads out in concentric rings of skittering percussion and a jostling brace of linguistically fallow syllables - all stresses, no glides. Watch for the break.
9. Bootsy's back, sighing and whispering through the mutated waltz of "The Seas are the Skies". It gets a little claustrophobic here; you might want to open a window. Unless you're worried about the sea roaring in.
10. "We All are Already Are" closes Strong for the Future with an unwieldy title that somewhat reflects the vague meandering within, which has satisfying moments (see the warped piano figure that comes to the fore when the beat drops out), but lacks the focus of the album's hella strong front end. Still, while Strong for the Future's clarity blurs a bit in the late stage, its hermetic, lustrous atmosphere remains intact - a soundtrack for the planetarium.
