As the founding member of Kentucky noise psych freaks Hair Police and frequent participant in C. Spencer Yeh's Burning Star Core, Robert Beatty is partial to aggressive, speaker-splitting noise. His work as in-demand album-cover artist can be loud too-- it usually features big, bold images with every element clearly in view. There's subtlety in all of his art, for sure, but his starting point tends to be maximum volume.
That tendency is what makes Beatty's solo project, Three Legged Race, so fascinating. The electronic-based music on his debut full-length, Persuasive Barrier, is all about restraint. There's little that could be called noisy or confrontational in its 37 minutes. Instead, Beatty uses echo, distance, and nuance to create a chilly, desolate aura. After years of skilled noise-wrangling, he turns out to also be a master of deep-space vibe. His small blips, short squiggles, and muted beats play like transmissions from a far-off planet.
Exactly what those transmissions mean is unclear, because Three Legged Race is less about concrete ideas than atmospheres. And those atmospheres are wide and evocative enough to sound different to each listener. For me, Persuasive Barrier instills the same eerie feeling I get from the scene in 2001 in which astronauts first encounter the monolith. But for Beatty there's no need for ear-shattering dissonance at the end, just more thick, magnetic sound.
The trippy futurism of 60s-era artifacts like 2001 courses through much of Persuasive Barrier. A few moments-- such as the whirring pulse of the title track, or the rippling lines of "Locked Eyes"-- recall space age bachelor pad music, and others could soundtrack The Andromeda Strain. In weaker hands, these leanings might feel generic. It's a risk shared by many noise types who moved toward electronics in the past few years, approaching new age, industrial, and EDM. And some have in fact been too beholden to the past. But Beatty subverts stylistic constraints, making music that feels less like an exercise than something lived-in and thought-through. As a result, you don't have to be interested in his influences or his past to find something to hook onto.
At his best, Beatty mixes synth-music tropes with less predictable moves, in the process marrying structure to abstraction. In "Magnetic Bride", he combines spacey pulses with what sounds like a robot humming through a vocoder. During "Budgeting Air", Fennesz-like waves of glitch generate trails of phasey tone. Although these and other tracks are wordless, narrative shapes do emerge, with sonic signposts that feel like beginnings, middles, and ends. The shapeliest is closer "Permethrin II". It plays like the entire album in miniature, as Beatty weaves a synth tale not unlike those on Ricardo Donoso's similarly-stellar Assimilating the Shadow. This time, he does end with a 2001 monolith-style din. But it won't make you hold your ears-- more likely, Persuasive Barrier will leave them a little more open than before*.*
