I downloaded a few house tracks the other day on the recommendation of one of the Euro shop/distributor sites (concise and efficiently presented, of course), and noticed rampant usage of the word "minimal" as a positive qualifier. In this sect of music retail, everything from minimal pop to "minimal techno banger" to "functional minimalism" is esteemed. I couldn't find any negative references of the word minimal, and I wondered if, in this environment, it was possible to tag anything minimal and not simultaneously be giving it a compliment. Of course, I read this at a merchant website, so not finding much in the way of objective critique isn't surprising. Nevertheless, I forged ahead.
Next, I googled Pitchfork's very own review archives for the word. Okay, so the first thing I found was my review of a techno single, so that doesn't count. The next one was Philip Shelburne's excellent "The Month in Techno" column from August, wherein he asked, "Can we please stop calling Cologne techno 'minimal'?" His point was that in the scheme of hip, new techno, a lot of what gets called minimal isn't actually all that minimal. Next, I found Mark Richardson asking "how minimal is too minimal?" suggesting that there really is a limit to how much (or little) minimalism we can stand. Later, he goes on to criticize the music as "flat and one-dimensional", and thus provides a decent benchmark for this: When you get down to one dimension, you've gone too far.
The problem is that the "less is more" concept in music is trickier than it looks. On Excepter's Self Destruction, I imagine some effort was made to quantize a sound that had theretofore been notable mostly because it seemed almost totally immune to imposed organization. The Brooklyn outfit, headed by John Fell Ryan, drifted spectrally through the same cosmic ether as neighbors Black Dice on occasion, playing "noise" that dove headfirst into modernist (and post-modernist) arenas of mechanization and detachment-- from the rest of the noise-improv underground, if from nowhere else-- even while it was psychedelic in the extreme. I would have had a hard time picking out minimalism in previous records KA and Throne, and though I was interested from the moment I heard they'd made a "house" record, I'm not sure I hear it here either.
But then house isn't the same thing as minimalism, though they share some ideas (like how to use repetition to best effect). Yet, Self Destruction confuses me: If this is a house record, where are the climaxes and releases? The gradual builds and subtle modulations? The beats?? As it happens, there are beats to be found here, but they're uniformly small, brittle, and possibly Casio-generated. Even then, I'd like to give them credit for turning workaday house drama on its head with dry, impersonal sounds, but I think that rather than make a house record, they've made a haphazardly minimal one. Rather than paint from a grid using colors from another world, they've simply reduced the number of colors they use and painted freehand geometrical objects.
To Excepter's credit, Self Destruction is billed as a house record in name only, apparently inspired more in spirit by the genre than in "realized form". That translates to a pretty liberal usage of, well, everything-- which has always seemed part of the Excepter M.O. "Shoot Me First" begins as electric sting synth and human barks at the moon, occasionally punctuated by falling stars and electro-drum pads. As moaning voices are added and the disparate tones cut into each other for screen time, the song shares much with past Excepter music. However, there are subtle differences: The sound is cleaner (probably due to this album being the band's first to feature multi-track recording and mixing), there's a lot less reverb than usual, and the general mood is less claustrophobic, more bluntly dissonant. It's as if you took a wet-dry vac to one of Excepter's spongy pieces, and sucked all the liquid out, leaving just a dry, porous mass.
"Bad Vibration" is similarly anemic, but uses a steady, pulsating drum machine tambourine to keep things moving, and a subterranean, almost submerged bass line, sounding as if blasted from an underwater cave. Ryan's lead vocal/tripping mumble is pretty out-in-front, as Excepter songs go, though is none the sturdier for it. Even surfing over the rhythmic ebb and flow, it's still a pretty queasy "melody," though aided by the hazy, brooding vibe of the track, it imparts a whole range of confusion, fatalism and solemn dementia. Likewise, "BB+B (For 2b/2c)" uses a steady beat (midtempo and hip electro, but rudimentary) and vocals to make ghostly dance music, but here seems reigned in rather than reformed. It's not that the beats are bad, per se; rather, they're transparent, as if the lo-fi instrumentation that went into the mixing board got the better of the house concept. The vocals again seem called in from another planet, but aren't enough to keep me from falling through the holes in the architecture of the piece as a whole.
Still, when Self Destruction works, it works well. "Interplay: Lock Room" and "Interplay: Your House"-- surely the most bizarre husband-wife (Caitlin Cook and Calder Martin) duets ever-- features house-esque arrangement of 808 tambourine, cowbell and handclaps, alongside Cook's alto calls, and even a recurring, harmonized synth line that almost lulls me into the idea I'm listening to actual dance music. The end of "Your House" falls off the piece like water retreating from the beach, back into the sea; the lone vocal evaporates and dark, metallic synth sparkles dim out into nothing. If KA was meditations on chaos, this is more nihilistic, and accepting of the void. But I'm cool with that. Better to minimize the arrangement than the emotional truth, regardless of where it takes you.
