The pin drops inside a minimal techno clean room. A technician is there to hear it, and he captures the resulting tic on his unidirectional mic. The speck of sound spikes on a nearby monitor, and soon it's been tweaked and expanded like digitized grey matter silly putty, permuting beats and dot-matrix melodies into a new orchestral maneuver that bumps with quiet dignity from a dark and inviting future. Geoff White is versed in this pinprick aesthetic. Under his own name (for Force Inc., amongst others), he's produced quiet techno that shimmers like an echo in a subway tunnel, but is also stippled with the steely signature of sparks flown. Both rigid and poseable, his tracks are like robots with swivel-arm battle-grip.
Debuting for Ghostly International as Aeroc, White leans back from that approach. Instead of wrapping plastic rhythms in expansive, fleecy melodies, Viscous Solid approaches glitch through the point of a guitar pick, and takes its time at the crests of its deep breaths. Whereas even minimal techno relies on a rhythmic framework, Aeroc dives headlong into doctored sounds without borders for restriction.
Word on the street says a manipulated acoustic guitar was responsible for the majority of Viscous Solid. It's definitely a factor in opener "My Love, The Wave Break", where repeated strums coast over consistently percussive smudges. The untreated acoustic adds welcome warmth to the track's more traditional underpinnings, giving it the quality of a hologram in the midst of a particularly leisurely daydream. A brief, windblown surge leads into "Mahy", where that familiar ping-pong tickle travels parallel to the guitar's gentle ramble. Here, however, it's almost too far away from the foreground beat. Aeroc could be ruminating on the static effect of technology on organics, but he likely just got carried away with the echo pedal.
Aeroc uncovers weight in the quietest of places. "Fall First" pits the hums of dueling industrial refrigerators against a downed power line's threatening pops and clicks; the result is a pulsing channel of eerie, creeping gloom. However, this song is also the corridor into Viscous Solid's holding pattern center. "Wish Eyes" and "Vio La" drift into a tonal experimentalism that's effective, but somewhat banal next to tracks that blend their formless, swirling approach with subtle yet expressive rhythms. "Enter"'s layered bass tones ooze like black jelly, filling in the divots that line its backbone blips and cut-up acoustic chording. One of the album's strongest songs, "Enter" blends minimal techno's engaging, subtle rigidity with Aeroc's own penchant for six string-derived eclecticism.
Viscous Solid actually grows stronger as it moves along, even with the occasional stall in momentum. The sunny, layered guitars of "Onward... Upward" are almost unexpected when they finally arrive, but that doesn't prevent the track from conjuring images of a Zip drive named Gordon Lightfoot playing a concert for out-of-work CPUs. And emerald grass grows from between his microcircuits. "Summer's Almost Over" closes things out with its insistent, stuttering plinks and channel-shifting swells. Sticking around until its halfway mark brings a flurry of rangy acoustic snippets that surface trebly and flat, field recordings floating over what's become a multi-part rhythm when no one was watching. That's how, in its best moments, Viscous Solid is like plugging an electroencephalogram into the pickup of a Guild.
