It must not be easy being one of David Psutka’s reverb units. He pushes them hard, stretching their sustain settings to extreme lengths and running heavy material through them constantly: The clang of struck sheet metal, the crash of broken windows, the dissonant peal of heavy bells. His reverb is so glassy and expansive it feels like the main attraction, not the supplementary effect. Most musicians apply reverb the way a photographer might subtly retouch an image, using it to add a sense of depth to a given sound. But in Psutka’s hands, it comes across more like one of Madame Tussaud’s wax sculptures—an eerie, distended facsimile immobilized under a spotlight, a frozen echo deep in the uncanny valley.
Where Psutka’s first two records hewed to the jagged blueprint proposed by his Night Slugs peers, his recent work has been getting more and more abstract, downplaying club music’s beats in favor of an all-encompassing throb. On his latest album as Egyptrixx, his main alias, it sounds more than ever like the Toronto electronic musician is trying to burrow inside a migraine, stick contact mics to its contours, and figure out just what makes it tick. It is a heaving mass of ringing copper and seasick frequencies. Not only is it free of anything you might classify as a melody; even its basslines are reduced to an ominous rumble, and its glancing riffs feel as accidental as wind chimes.
It’s a long way away from the prickly, technoid pulse of tunes like “A/B Til Infinity” or “Bible Eyes,” which variously explored John Carpenter synths and the loping beats of UK funky. But it makes for a logical next step from his last album as Egyptrixx, 2015’s doomy Transfer of Energy (Feelings of Power), and it comes even closer in spirit to a record that he released last year under his Ceramic TL alias, Sign of the Cross Every Mile to the Border. That album, a mostly ambient exploration of held bell tones and granular delay, had the bitter reek of an electrical fire, and this record replicates those noxious atmospheres and reintroduces beats: thudding kick drums, zippering hi-hats, and the incessant din of battered metal. His scrap-heap percussion often has more in common with Einstürzende Neubauten than it does club music peers like Bok Bok or Jam City.
Despite the heaviness, the bell tones’ broad, spectral sweep infuses the music with a rich, burnished glow, and the presence of vocoders and chiming FM synths only adds to the luminous air. The album opens with the sound of running water, and that sound recurs throughout the record, bubbling up like a hot spring and offering a soothing counterpoint to the omnipresent violence. The mood is jarring and gentle all at once, battering the listener with car-crash frequencies and then offering sweeter sounds as a kind of balm. It’s a disorienting listen: His arrangements are as murky as a flooded catacombs, and the way that arpeggiated bell tones and other motifs recur in nearly identical forms across the album, it can be easy to feel marooned amidst its swirl, and the claustrophobic sameness of his sound design verges on the suffocating.
Presumably this is all part of the point. Taking inspiration from the ocean’s burgeoning quantities of plastic flotsam and jetsam, Psutka describes the album’s aesthetic as “pacific litter clank; chill torrents and artificial triumphalism.” He’s definitely nailed the vibe: The music drifts in a great, heaving mass, like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and it’s beautiful and monstrous all at once. It really does sound like a ton of plastic shifting its weight around: Dumping a tub of my kid’s Legos on the floor, I was immediately struck by the sonic similarity to Egyptrixx’s palette. There’s simply too much of it, though. What feels bracingly alien for the first five or six tracks turns into a hard slog by the tenth; it would have been far effective to shut things down after “Plastic Pebble [beat],” a climactic mixture of grime synths, trap hi-hats, and the dissonant clang of EVOL-era Sonic Youth. That was a problem on Psutka’s last couple of albums, too; his concepts are stronger than his editing skills. Still, taken in moderate doses, it’s a strangely moving portrait of ecological collapse translated into sound.
