Unlike the attic that stores away those forgotten, tuneless chord changes you tentatively composed back in the seventh grade, computers unforgivingly archive even the most tangential, half-remembered experiments. Taken as a whole, the digitized narrative's abortive starts and eventual triumphs transform a lifeless hard drive into a fractured bildungsroman that traces the lopsided development of its anonymous archivist. On Pasted Lakes, unwilling to click and drag his nascent apprenticeship into the trash, Brooklyn-based Nick Forté remixes and recontextualizes the slapdash scraps and cutouts of his first forays into computer music, creating a mixed bag of jaggedly lurching electro experiments initially intended to fit together as a different album entirely.
Draping this recycled project in a futuristic atomic-era floor plan, Forté levitates stylistically between muted Lesser and highly caffeinated Nobukaza Takemura; though he mentions utilizing the rhythmic pacing of Wire and The Minutemen as a guide for his work, that particular swing isn't apparent beyond the theoretical nod. Assuming he had found a way to harness the spirit of Double Nickels on the Dime or a fraction of the energy from his work as a guitarist in early 90s hardcore mainstays Rorschach or his later staccato slicing in NYC post-punks Computer Cougar, this stuff would absolutely sizzle with crunchy dynamics, a microwave stuffed with pastel paint samples. Instead, like Christmas Decorations-- his pretty but vacant Kranky-released ambient project with Steve Silverstein-- Pasted Lakes is largely a patch of disjointed background music suffering from snippet sizing and thin Yars' Revenge formations.
The first track on the album, "Green Language", provides the exception. Here, on the longest and most dynamically sustained piece on the album, Forté creates a richly detailed floatation device suggesting a tide pool in its tiny waves of asymmetrical percussion, shimmering loops, tonal refraction, and a mooning guitar's hum like a digitized gull escaping into the rocky brush. Another strong track, "Blender Dance" works along two strands: gentle percussion powered by shiny star reflections torn apart with a ratty tonal loop. More reminiscent of poor-man dadaist Phil Milstein than the high-modernist gloss of Mouse on Mars or Oval, the other works flit and flutter as brief sound-effect montages; some heave and hurl and fold inward, others stagger over sine waves or burrow through logarithms, but none take off or swagger into different dimensions. "Sugar Lemoned" is slowcore Gamelan played with digitized kazoos; "Did You Feel That?" falls into Space Invaders territory. Likewise, "Swallowing Gel" is a flatulent Atari attack from congested locusts. Bits like "Crack and Crevice" and "Kill Your Carpet" coast at a slower pace, without managing to shift the tonal quality of the work. But all isn't lost.
While Forté's leftovers do lack the depth and textured spaciousness of more experienced progenitors of CPU riffage, the rugged punk-rock heart beating behind his often beautiful collages produces a sense of gleeful discovery absent on more dryly established productions. And that's a small good thing.
