Maybe you thought you knew what you were getting from a Pulse Emitter album called Tide Pools. Limpid ambient miniatures lapping against the speakers, right? Turns out Daryl Groetsch got all that out of his system with his 2022 album Dusk and the run of synth albums he’s put out under his own name since then; now, he’s ready to play in spikier territory. More challenging than Dusk or Swirlings, his 2020 debut for the trippy Chicago label Hausu Mountain, Tide Pools suggests not so much the shimmering surface of its namesake as the strange denizens that might be found within, pulsating and flexing their spines for whatever beachcomber is lucky enough to find them.
Still drawing from the array of vintage synths that are his bread and butter, Groetsch paints here with short-attack, long-release choir tones; where his sequencers previously bubbled in the Phaedra fashion, here they press closely against the listener’s ear like the ones used by the Japanese producer Shinichi Atobe. The tone is urgent and almost panicked for much of the first half, starting with “Energy Flying,” which puts Logic Pro’s trusty “South African Voice Effects” sound-pack preset (you might remember it as the “timo” from Kendrick Lamar’s “Mr. Morale”) through a wringer of little backmasked interruptions as the sequencers go bugnuts. In the second half, the music relaxes and is allowed to unfurl a little more, characterized by quieter pieces like the chittering “Critters” or the pinging, Barker-like “Scattered Clouds.”
Though Groetsch’s been recording for HausMo for years, he’s something of an outlier on their roster. He’s been prolific on many labels for more than two decades, starting in 2002 with the hard-to-find IDM pastiche Slem, and he lives in Portland rather than Chicago, the experimental-music hotspot that’s the source of much of the label’s core catalog. His music for HausMo has leaned more sedate than recent releases like d’Eon’s chamber-prog medulla-yanker Leviathan or the phone-composed sample splatter of Jetski’s The Radiant Radish. On Tide Pools he ramps up to the level of his labelmates, both in its progginess (the back cover includes a quote from Rush’s “Natural Sciences”) and in the way it seems a little more computerized than his earlier works, with MIDI playing a bigger role.
Dusk’s blocky, vintage palette made the music somehow creepier and more inspiring than if it’d been rendered in the meticulously sound-designed language of, say, Monolake; I was reminded of old monster movies whose practical effects had a physicality often absent from CGI. Tide Pools is uncanny in a different way, one that’s become a constant in experimental music since the early days of vaporwave, steeped in a sentimental (if slightly apprehensive) view of the crude 3D and unplaceable eeriness that defines the early age of computers. “Jellyfish and Friends” could be a lost theme from the sort of educational PC game you might’ve played in a library if you were a kid in the late ’90s, while “Bug on Desk” and “Tide Pool 1” are written in computer start-up tones not unlike the one Brian Eno famously designed for Windows 95.
The early internet often seems tied to the element of water, maybe because there’s something uniquely beautiful about the way water looks rendered in low-res digital media—as on the awesome cover from HausMo co-founder Max Allison; wouldn’t you love to rejuvenate in those pools?—or maybe because its sparkling surface conceals vast and scary depths. Groetsch finds that intersection and submerges in it. Stretching for 45 minutes across 15 tracks, Tide Pools doesn’t quite escape the trap some digital prog albums fall into, where the combination of claustrophobic sound design and content-packed maximalism leads to the same sort of fatigue you might get from staring at a screen too long. But at its best, the barrier between the listener and the music turns liquid.
