Hip-hop is but a distant memory on Pattern of Excel, the latest album—and the latest reinvention—from Lee Bannon, the Sacramento-raised, New York-based producer born Fred Warmsley. Aside from a few incidental scraps, there are no voices here, and there are hardly any beats, either—just rumbling synths, quivering effects, placid electric guitar, and oodles of atmosphere. It's not inconceivable that you might mistake it for some forgotten post-rock obscurity from the mid-'90s.
It wouldn't be the first time that Warmsley has looked to the past for inspiration. He got his start, as a member of Joey Bada$$'s Pro Era crew, making colorful boom-bap beats indebted to DJ Premier, RZA, and the Native Tongues era. Last year's Alternate/Endings, his first big step away from hip-hop, nodded to canonical jungle producers like Goldie, as well as breakbeat mavericks like Squarepusher and Luke Vibert. To dig back through his catalog—from the whimsical sample flips of The Big Toy Box to the transient random noise bursts of 2012's Fantastic Planet to the mutant jungle experiments of Alternate/Endings and its companion EP, Main/Flex—is to track the development of a restless musical sensibility.
Ironically, then, one thing that distinguishes Pattern of Excel is its abiding sense of calm. The most turbulent sound on the album is the splash of water at the beginning of "Good / Swimmer", which opens the record. From there on in (save for one song, "Inflatable", that sounds like a shuddering drum'n'bass remix of Autechre), it's all smooth sailing—or smooth drifting, anyway. He's fond of resonant synths and grainy field recordings and silvery electric guitar run clean, offering a marked contrast to the tape hiss and distorted undercurrents that lie just below the surface. In "Suffer Gene", monosyllabic vocal samples spin slowly in midair like the pieces of a mobile. "Shallowness Is the Root of All Evil" ruminates on a guitar tone inspired by Ennio Morricone and Angelo Badalmenti, post-rock's patron saints of twang, and the pedal-steel returns in "Disneµ Girls", a lilting, romantic miniature in waltz time.
It's not all so beatific; a few tracks hint at his industrial leanings. (Speaking to Interview last year, he mentioned Goldie and Coil as twin poles of his habitual listening.) The minute-long "Dx2" is a steel spring swathed in reverb, waiting to snap; "Aga" is the ghost of a boom-bap rhythm shrouded in gothic synths, part DJ Shadow and part Siouxsie. "Artificial Stasis" plays his dark side against his more dulcet tendencies to spine-tingling effect. As slow-moving guitar notes hover before a looming void, it brings to mind Ben Frost remixing Low.
One wonders if the album's title is supposed to be ironic: while contemporary production software like Ableton often resembles a game of Tetris played on spreadsheets, Bannon's music refuses to be contained by the grid. In that sense, despite the differences in mood and tone, Pattern of Excel is a logical extension of Alternate/Endings. Even making drum'n'bass, his tracks didn't unfold in the usual ways; they were slippery and unpredictable, and while their sound wasn't lo-fi, exactly, it was hardly the hyper-engineered, studio-perfect sound of contemporary club-ready jungle. It was fallible and fucked up and proudly uninterested in functionalism. Pattern of Excel is similarly idiosyncratic—it feels, in many ways, like a fistful of sketches torn from the notebook and tossed to the wind. Making sense of the ways they fall is part of the pleasure of this quiet, cryptic record.
