Where does a novice begin with Gerald Donald’s sprawling discography? Since the early ‘90s, he has approached almost every facet of his career with shadowy evasiveness. Outside of his widely celebrated work with James Stinson as Drexciya, Donald has rotated through at least a dozen projects, creating aliases that veer between stone classics like “Formenverwandler” and twisting cyberpunk abstractions. Muddying the waters where credit is concerned, cover art and press releases deliberately lead people astray with imagined backstories and nebulous collaborators.
Tying all this together is a unique and consistent sonic signature, immediately identifiable across decades and as entrancing as it is deceptively simple. Built on a bedrock of snappy electro drum programming, twinkling synth arpeggiations, and ominous cinematic harmonies, Donald’s work in Dopplereffekt, often in collaboration with fellow traveler To Nhan Le Thi, is his most widely known. 1995’s debut Fascist State featured some of the project’s most notorious outings, with songs about sex with a mannequin, pornographic voyeurism and a disconcerting fascination with eugenics. While Dopplereffekt was welcomed at the time by the electroclash scene, the project has since moved further and further from the dance floor. Cellular Automata is their first LP since 2007’s thorny and mesmerizing Calabi Yau Space, and it follows a recent surge of activity that includes festival appearances and standout EPs for Leisure System. If you’ve waded in the waters of Drexciya and are curious for more, Cellular Automata is as good a place as any to dive deeper into the abstract, unsettling corners of Donald’s world.
Not that he uses that name; on this LP, he goes by Rudolf Klorzeiger, though for years he identified as Heinrich Mueller (named after the Nazi Gestapo chief). This self-mythologizing is a big part of what draws people in, but it wouldn’t mean much if the music weren’t up to snuff. Automata doesn’t upend expectations—it could have easily been released one year after Calabi rather than ten—but its nine beatless mood pieces, each approximately the length of a pop song, sound great. The blend of tingling, neon-hued ’80s futurism and sinister drone place it halfway between Tangerine Dream’s film work and the OST’s for anime classics like *Akira *or Ghost in the Shell.
The titles, however, all tell of scientific fact. “Isotropy,” “Pascal’s Recursion,” “Exponential Decay,” and others evoke the world of mathematical principles, theorems, and proofs. It’s up to the listener to decode precisely how the chunky bassline and haunting moans of “Von Neumann Probe” relate to its namesake theory of self-replicating spacecraft, but it certainly sets a striking tone. An early standout is “Gestalt Intelligence.” Following a vaporous synthetic breath, the song pulls a sly 1-2 on listeners when its initial dawning harmonies are suddenly darkened by a menacing lower note. It’s a simple gesture, but a chilling one. As the song builds, more dissonance is introduced, conjuring a malevolent hivemind plotting its insurgency. “Pascal’s Recursion” meanwhile sounds like an abandoned factory come to life, rusty pipes and all.
The album’s only weakness is perhaps its uniformity. The tracks bleed together, evoking a teeming futuristic landscape cruised over at low altitudes. Automata is an unpopulated world, one of cold precision, pregnant pauses and nameless dread. According to a 2014 interview, Dopplereffekt is “representing concepts and abstractions with music data. In other words, physical reality can be represented by musical arrangement and atmosphere.” While an early track celebrated scientists with the rather unsubtle lyrics (“Sitting in a laboratory/Conducting experiments/Analyzing data/I am a scientist”), Automata expresses the type of awe that comes with deeper knowledge of our universe’s magnitude and unfathomable complexity.
Tooling their synthesizers to mirror natural phenomenon, these songs can be seen as attempts to understand our place in the cosmos, a musical response to and interpretation of scientific and mathematical breakthroughs. Each component works as simply as possible to channel as much of life’s mystery as possible, keeping any trace of melodrama at bay. While in the past Dopplereffekt have drawn on some of the 20th century’s darkest moments, perhaps drawing parallels between the Nazi’s ruthless mechanical efficiency and Detroit’s own automation age rise and fall, here they look past the world of human affairs and the effect is profound. This is music to get lost in, and the more one explores Dopplereffekt’s world, the harder it is to remember why you would ever want to find a way out.
