Matthew Arkell and Aaron David Ross, the New York duo who record as Gatekeeper, produce planet-sized electronic works. At present their audience is relatively small, setting up a marked contrast between where they find themselves and where they'd seemingly like to be heading. Their last LP, the Hippos in Tanks release Exo, wilted under the strain of ideas at times, ultimately forging an uncertain path between acid house-inspired club jams and a fondness for the bombast of rock. On the Young Chronos EP, a free Pirate Bay torrent that's also available for 300 USB tokens from the Italian label Presto!?, they've kept the central tenets of their sound intact while solidifying their overall vision. This material is tighter and more expansive than what came before, with the sense of absurdity deliriously heightened.
If you've ever wondered what Montserrat Caballé would sound like if she necked a fistful of pills and teamed up with A Guy Called Gerald, this is as close as you'll ever get. Operatic vocals are threaded in and out of the EP, along with enough dramatic élan for Hollywood to finally consider giving up on "The Ride of The Valkyries". Essentially this is the sound of Gatekeeper capitalizing on the closing track of Exo, "Encarta", where they blew everything wide open via imposing choirs, a healthy sense of pretense, and beats that sounded like they were storming the palace at Versailles. One of the tracks on Young Chronos, the fantastically titled "Sword of the Gathering Clouds of Heaven", begins with the kind of vigorous chanting that Exo closed out with, setting up a neat loop between one work and the other.
Another tie that binds this with prior Gatekeeper output is the feeling of high concept pranksters at work, albeit ones with a meagre budget compared to artists they’re obviously indebted to, such as the KLF and Malcolm McLaren. McLaren even tried his hand at opera fusion on the 1984 record Fans, to uneven effect. The tracks here are anything but backward looking, instead taking elements of dance music's past (knotty twists of acid, thundering jungle-inspired drum programing) and spewing them out in an unholy mangle that's uniquely theirs. It works better as a representation of Gatekeeper's vision than Exo, partly because it's a quickie EP with half the tracks under the three-minute mark. But it's also because the pomposity is so well executed. There are grand plans here, hatched with a sense of ridiculous self importance, and humor.
The different shades of Young Chronos include patient builds ("Imperatix"), wonderfully ludicrous slow-burn tracks ("Flame of Displeasure"), and something that resembles incidental music from a lost arthouse feature ("The Soil Has Soured"). The highs and lows come rattling so fast that it's frequently disorienting, with "Harvest" and "Hanseatic" both dipping into disappointingly straight acid grooves just when they appeared to be leaning further into eccentricity. Fortunately, Arkell and Ross keep acting on extravagant ideas throughout, upping the sense of scale and ambition from Exo to a point where it's difficult to imagine how loud and wide they could go next time out. At the very least this is a strong step in the right direction. A search for the Pirate Bay torrent at the time of writing indicates Young Chronos has 11 seeds and one leecher. Such grandiose dreams need a far bigger stage than that.
