Rian Treanor’s style of electronic music is daunting. The sounds are microscopic and synthetic, either glowing like LEDs or gleaming like cold steel, but they leave sizzling craters on impact. Melody and rhythm merge into a rapid-fire spray that makes a mockery of musical modes and scales even while he works within them, thanks to Max/MSP devices that the English artist designs himself. It can feel solitary, almost maddening—the work of an artist obsessively trying to one-up himself. Which makes it surprising that his collaborations are actually some of his best work, whether he’s playing with a Ugandan fiddle player or his father, experimental electronic luminary Mark Fell. It’s hard to imagine another artist entering his impenetrable world, but those pairings push his sound, whether to new extremes of melody or new realms of weirdness.
Treanor’s latest partnership, with Scottish singer and academic Cara Tolmie, began with a live performance in 2023 at Counterflows Festival in Glasgow. It culminates with this album, recorded a year later in Stockholm. Treanor’s stickiest and most bracing record yet, Body Lapse lodges in the mind even as it scrambles it. Tolmie’s style of “internal singing”—grunts, vocal squeaks, sharp breaths, wails—is consumed by Treanor’s programmatic methods, and becomes part of the fabric of his music, occasionally bursting out in jagged shards. There’s a cliché about man versus machine in here somewhere, but Treanor has met his match in Tolmie, who can muster up otherworldly sounds from her diaphragm to spar with Treanor’s sharpest notes. His rhythms range from dancehall-style syncopation to empty space and low-end rumbling more befitting a psychological thriller.
And, at its best, Body Lapse is truly thrilling. Opener “As the Unified Field Bursts” cuts up Tolmie’s voice into chipmunk squeaks, the kind that defined a whole era of post-dubstep, then turns them into machine-gun fire over scorched earth. If ever there was an opener meant to scare squeamish listeners away, this is it. There are moments of eerie silence and grumbling bass that leave room for keening vocals, like on “Sleep Guessings,” whose jarring silent-loud dynamics remind me of Tilt-era Scott Walker, though not quite as terrifying. The eerie “My Little Loophhole” balances saccharine melodies with jackhammer percussion, sounding a bit like SOPHIE’s evil twin, hell-bent on destruction.
But Body Lapse’s volatility can start to wear. “My Little Loophole” dissipates into a mist that undercuts its power, and the album’s sequencing sags in the middle. The otherwise approachable centerpiece “Ereh Am I,” which features some truly gorgeous, harp-like work from Treanor, goes on for over eight minutes. It’s a canny fusion of Dry Cleaning and “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream,” impishly calling out Treanor by name, but it starts to feel like a narrative in search of a purpose halfway through.
The wonderfully titled “Incongruous Diva,” a true mind-meld between Treanor and Tolmie, embodies the power of the rest of the LP. Here Tolmie sounds discombobulated, angry at her inability to get words out. It comes to a head with a guttural, spittle-flecked utterance of the word “fucking,” a fucking to end all fuckings, as if it were expelled involuntarily. “Incongruous Diva” underlines the depth of her internal singing as Treanor’s broken rhythm heaves underneath. But it’s also hard to listen to, as shocking and uncomfortable as touching a raw nerve.
Body Lapse’s irritable mood swings and gauntlet-like progression can occasionally make it feel more like a live set awkwardly forced into the shape of an album. It’s a remarkable entry in an already stunning catalogue, but maybe one you’re less likely to revisit than more varied records like File Under UK Metaplasm or Saccades. With Body Lapse, Treanor has succeeded in one-upping himself with the musical equivalent of an uppercut, a fist fused out of wires and sinewy muscle. It’s about as painful, but also as badass, as that sounds.
