Odd Nosdam's Burner is a digest of field recordings, Moog synths, staticky samples, and scattershot drums, all waxing and waning around immovable slabs of buzzing bass. It splits the difference between the eschatological IDM of Boards of Canada's Geogaddi and Keith Fullerton Whitman's coruscating dronescapes.
There are loads of sounds embedded in Burner. For instance, what's that thing called, with the bridge of electricity running between two antennae? Zzzzhk! Zzzzhk! Jacob's Ladder, I think. That's on there, among the layered angelic harmonies of "Untitled One". There are also clamoring crowds, car alarms, banging gavels, laughing children, lawn sprinklers, plentiful variations on static, and what one might call white noise, if one erroneously believed that white noise was just any old racket (it's not). There are also some uninteresting sounds: More than once, Nosdam juxtaposes his kaleidoscopic drone against samples from old educational recordings, which has been done to death in instrumental hip-hop and electronic collage-based music.
If interesting sounds aren't enough for you there are many cameos, and a weird sort of crossover aspect to the record. Two songs, "11th Ave Freakout" parts one and two, crib their titles from Fog's recent LP, although Andrew Broder appears on neither the shimmering first part, replete with sampled beatdown sounds and a Vanilla Ice sample, or part two, where Mike Patton and Why? add vocal harmonies to Nosdam's spiraling synths. But Broder does contribute, along with Múm's Orvar Smarason, to "Small Mr. Man Pants", a peristaltic pulse teeming with whistles, horns, and woodwinds. The song-- named for Nosdam's old group cLOUDDEAD-- finds Liz Hosdon's long, sonorous syllables paddling in a bassy soup, and Jessica Bailiff adds some layered vocals to the clipped electric bolts of "Untitled Three" and the closing epic "Flying Saucer Attack".
You've heard music like this before: The saturation of sound seems to conjure some amorphous pre-conscious roar; the samples and cadences scan as a Futurist ode to the din of city life; and the results can be read, grandiosely, as a timeless distillation of human consciousness, or, more modestly, as a literal take on the truism that "music is all around us." For a genre that wants to evoke mysterious, uncharted territories, it's beginning to show signs of predictability, and while Odd Nosdam hews admirable results from it, it's just about time for an increasingly defined border to be pushed outward, into more nebulous territory, again.
