To this day, technology still has yet to approach an accurate approximation of nature. High-end CGI animations may elicit "ooh's" and "aah's" from us now, but in a few years, we're going to look back at something like the Final Fantasy movie and just laugh, the same way we currently laugh at an outdated special effects extravaganza like King Kong.
Still, there's something oddly cool and impressive about a movie like King Kong, or even a more recent laughable special effects wankathon like Starship Troopers. It seems to be woven into the fabric of the human mind to be impressed, or at least entertained, by any kind of artificial reality that is at all analogous to our own.
This principle extends perfectly into the realm of electronic music, where the quest for new and interesting sounds and the quest to electronically emulate organic sounds intermingle with concurrently fascinating and wildly entertaining results. Good electronic music provides the excitement of hearing a sound that you've possibly never heard before, and the fun of being able to try to figure out what that sound's sources was.
Supermogadon, the latest album from Josh Presseisen under his Marumari alias, wonderfully captures the intriguing synthetic façade of sci-fi. But whereas its predecessor, The Wolves Hollow, was oftentimes outright cheesy and cartoonish, Supermogadon is much more subtle and subdued. The Wolves Hollow drew its inspiration from a fictitious story of Plutonian wolves and cow brains; Supermogadon draws its inspiration from Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, converting chapter titles to song titles and co-opting cover art.
Like The Wolves Hollow before it, Supermogadon takes a wonderfully warped approach to the futuristically fake. Barely audible vocal tracks are buried beneath drum machine beats and bubbly synthesizers. "Indigo Florist," the album's standout track, layers synthesized bells with staticky drum machines and bouncy bass synthesizer. The song retains a relatively constant feel as new elements are added and removed, making for a subtle, gradual development. Sure, it doesn't necessarily reach through your headphones into your ears and violently shake its contents like a British nanny, but it certainly captivates when given proper attention.
Another highlight comes with "The Mutated Wisdom," a song that harbors many more twists and turns than most of the tracks on Supermogadon. A dissonant chorus of voice-like keyboards, a popping IDM beat, and sine wave synthesizers construct a clearly-defined rhythmic and melodic skeleton. Digitally manipulated squeaks scurry over the song like extraterrestrial rodents as a smooth drum machine beat shifts the track's rhythmic focus. At the end, everything fades out except for a distant echo of a synthesizer, which also quickly disappears.
Indeed, distance seems to be a sonic theme of Supermogadon. Most of the melodies on the album are obscured and faded-- a drop in aural resolution that causes many of the sounds on the album to bleed together into a far-off, semi-terrestrial sonic landscape. Occasionally, the very prominent drum machines seem a bit forced or obvious, only distracting from the intricacy of the more obscured melodic workings. Rather than making the subtle sounds seem more accessible, oftentimes the drum machine beats on Supermogadon have the opposite effect, contrasting the other sounds too harshly to let them shine through.
I'll concede that I've never read The Martian Chronicles. Nor have I seen the 1980 USA Miniseries adaptation with Bernadette Peters and Rock Hudson. But from what I've heard of Bradbury's classic, the sense of obscured unreality found on Supermogadon makes perfect sense. Using music instead of language, Pressiesen can convey this feeling in an instant, rather than fifty pages. Like a book, though, Supermogadon demands a significant portion of your attention to be fully appreciated.
