Benjamin Power and Andrew Hung, the duo behind Fuck Buttons, are restless, inveterate equipment scavengers: They've worked on computer software, on Casio keyboards, on children's toys, on old karaoke machines. In interviews, they come off as eager, curious, and transparent about their process and their gear, but their music is about as approachable as an Egyptian tomb. On Slow Focus, their first album in four years, Fuck Buttons remain devoted to forbidding, elemental sensations, and their slow-moving pieces inspire the kinds of big feelings-- exhilaration, majesty, awe-- that double as reminders of our smallness.
Listening to their progression, from 2008's Street Horrrsing to now, you get the sense of tinkerers building obsessively retooled versions of the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey, each bigger than the last. (We are the apes in this equation.) They got their start in the noise-rock community, but transcended that niche almost immediately, and their earliest material, some of featuring distorted, screaming vocals, sounds positively quaint in light of what followed. Tarot Sport was so much larger and more ambitious than their debut that it gave them an unlikely career as festival headliners, and a piece of the album ("Surf Solar") snuck its way into Opening Ceremony of the 2012 Olympics. Slow Focus feels like a logical endpoint to their journey: Tarot Sport might have gotten them to the Olympics, but they've never sounded this, well, Olympian before.
The difference is apparent from the opening seconds of the nine-minute "Brainfreeze." The massive sounds we hear-- a warped synth figure being pounded into shapes by hammering drums and a pistoning rhythm track-- are lonelier and more remote than anything Fuck Buttons have made before. Tarot Sport, big as it was, gestured vaguely at human bodies, with airy, glittering sounds on "Surf Solar" evoking an outdoor festival or a rave. There are no human bodies left on Slow Focus, just open space and hard surfaces, and the sounds resound for miles in all directions.
Power and Hung self-produced the record, and judging from the results, they should start producing for other acts as well. Every sound on Slow Focus is smooth, polished, and lovingly molded, like a factory-shaped piece of steel. The album's tone is a curious mix of juiced and muted, like Hung and Power have rewired the maximalism of stadium EDM to arrive at the minimalist emptiness of someone like Detroit's Robert Hood. This is perfectionist's music: Dr. Dre, who has been holed up for years vacuuming pathogens off of Detox like dead skin cells from a computer keyboard, might be chasing a sound like this-- deep and resonant and beautifully emptied-out.
The seven tracks tend to move in simple, navigational arcs: Open widescreen on an empty vista, pull back even further. Midway through "Brainfreeze", the synths shift up an octave and widen outward until they slowly swallow the track, a giant space cruiser blotting out the sky. "The Red Wing" begins with percussive pops and adds layers until the percussion all but disappears, a city shrinking to pinprick in a shuttle window. This journey might grow wearying if the textures on the album weren't so fascinating and dimensional; a piece like "Stalker" seems to be operating on six different planes at once, and it's a pleasure just to be able to walk through the space.
The song titles -- "Sentients", "The Red Wing", "Hidden XS"-- are unusually instructive for Fuck Buttons, who normally make a point of avoiding specific cues for their music. But Slow Focus plays like a utopian nightmare of mechanization-- on "Year of the Dog," György Ligeti strings screech beneath a Giorgio Moroder synth, while the first sound on the ten-minute "Stalker" is a bland, lasering synth, like a printer whirring away at a thousand-page document. Slow Focus is pointedly pitiless, inexorable: There are no human feelings here, at least of the squishy kind. If you are fascinated by the people around you the same way you are fascinated by protozoa, you might identify uncomfortably with the world Slow Focus depicts. When at the next TED Conference, a clicker-brandishing, headset-wearing speaker argues that harvesting organs from the rest of the human population is the logical way to progress, "Stalker" will probably be playing on the slideshow.
There has always been menace in Fuck Buttons' music, but it used to exist in balance with lighter, leavening moments, like "Bright Tomorrow" or "The Lisbon Maru". With the exception of the manic, squeegeeing synths that dance through "Prince's Prize", that touch is absent on Slow Focus. It's missed, slightly, but a little humor would have punctured the purity of the world they've built. Power and Hung have made either the year's most introverted party album or the most expansive loner's album; either way, there are few albums this year that offer this much space to get lost in.
