Great science is full of intuitive leaps, but the producers of The Atom Smashers, a documentary about physicists at Fermilab, employed a strictly rational approach for the soundtrack: They sought out an electronic musician who already works in evanescent particles and focused beams. It doesn't downplay Kate Simko's considerable talents to say that she was born to make this score, although perhaps you could say that of any techno producer as steeped in ambient and modernist music as she. Music From the Atom Smashers simply gives her a template on which to do what she does: one that nudges her away from crisp dancefloor fare like "She Said", toward the mysterious realms of Steve Reich, Wolfgang Voigt, and Brian Eno.
In fact, almost half of the album expires before we hear the first real house track, "God Particle". This is the particle for which the physicists are searching, and appropriately, the song seethes on the verge of an epiphany, with a melodic feeling of anticipation and bass so elastic it seems to be trying to mutter a revelation. Only "Sociber", an intestinal tunnel with drums that whiz and ping, similarly threatens to move your body. On most of the album, Simko is instead more interested in moving your space-time continuum. It would be tautological to call this "pattern music," but it's certainly pattern-conscious. Outside of the dance tracks and the anomalous but excellent "The Creative Part", a Philip Glass-indebted composition for burnished ostinatos and piano sunbursts, Simko works in layered pulses, like she’s breaking billiards racks in slow motion. She makes you feel the weave, not the line.
A number of recurring motifs betray the record's soundtrack status: skittering palpitations, sifting shards of broken china, cosmic slide-whistles, shamanistic rattles, and striated rumbles roughing up bloops, snaps, crackles, and pops. A lot of Rice Krispies, to be sure, but Simko remembers to cut in plenty of fruit: warm blurs of melodica on the splintering dirge "Quiet Daydream", lingering symphonic chords on "Nature Surreal". More interesting than the sounds themselves are the intelligence and sensitivity of their deployment, the constant attention to weight, color, and direction. You never get the feeling that Simko cued up a few devices, hit record, and kicked back with a crossword puzzle. She hovers over the album, alert and meticulous, fitting a bass line with anti-gravity boots here, skewing the angle of a comet's tail there. As a result, the repetitive nature of the sounds subsides from your attention, as you marvel about how they penetrate sonic spaces you couldn't perceive until they were filled.
