Study the erratic career arc of Eddie Ruscha Jr., the Los Angeles resident who records under the name Secret Circuit, and you'd be forgiven for thinking he doesn't care too much about how the outside world views his music. That impression mainly comes from the endless stream of self-released CDs and cassettes he's released under the Secret Circuit moniker, some of which were gathered on the excellent Tropical Psychedelics compilation in 2012. It wasn't always this way; Ruscha played in notable shoegazers Medicine for a time in the early 1990s, and in the Virgin-signed, John Cale-produced psychedelic rock act Maids of Gravity. Those failed glimpses of the limelight appeared to send him scurrying deep underground, only to surface for air again in recent times.
Tactile Galactics has the air of an album with something riding on it, not just for Ruscha, but also for Tim Sweeney, the WNYU DJ who is putting it out as the first full-length LP on his Beats in Space label. Both even admitted to feeling nervous about its release in a recent joint interview about the project. That fear doesn't translate to the music, which flashes past with a similar stylistic blur to the Tropical Psychedelics collection, gleefully pulling a wide range of influences into the mix. Sometimes the tools are different-- there's nothing here that infuses the Martin Denny lilt that lit up "Foggy Twilights" from Tropical-- but mostly it's airy, relaxed electronic work, rarely raising a sweat, often constructed from trancey vintage synth patterns that circle around one another.
It's a graceful and highly intricate record, sometimes taking a baffling amount of twists and turns. The arpeggiated swirl of "Exalter" shifts through so many changes it sometimes resembles a fully electronic take on an old Gong record. Ruscha can play it loose or tight whenever either mood takes him, ending the album with the endearingly sloppy keyboard work of "Milk" and dropping the tighter mood piece "Escargot" earlier in the tracklisting. Earnest vocal tracks occasionally surface-- a new addition to the Secret Circuit sound-- sometimes resembling the clash of earthy and synthetic impulses that Hot Chip like to play around with. That's the place where much of Tactile Galactics lands-- gentle electronic work touched by palpable human emotions, a mix that's often hard to get right, but which seems to come naturally to Ruscha (admittedly after many years of practice).
Those years spent toiling in the studio have also led to a natural cohesion that helps bridge Ruscha's fondness for moving from, say, wild cut-up synth lines that resemble Death in Vegas' "Dirt" ("Parascopic Rope") to the New Age stew of pan pipes and bongo fury that partly make up "Mountains". In lesser hands, Tactile Galactics would sound disjointed, maybe even rashly uneven. But Ruscha is clearly a big picture thinker with a careful ear for making connections. The deliberate choice to keep everything ticking over at 120 BPM throughout acts as the glue that holds it all together, giving this material a meditative feel that's as easy to lie back and get lost in as it is to dance to. It's understandable why Ruscha is so apprehensive about letting this work out in the open after getting burnt by the industry and then spending so long in the dark. Tactile Galactics shows why he's got no reason to hide anymore.
