When the Scottish electronic musician Claude Speeed remixed Kuedo’s “Work, Live & Sleep in Collapsing Space” in 2012, he wisely didn’t attempt to one-up the track’s maximalist energy. Instead, he went the opposite route, smearing Kuedo’s hyperactive arpeggios and tumbling hi-hats into something smooth and strangely featureless, like a shadow. But any suggestion that he was playing it safe disappeared once he showed his trump card in the final few minutes: a cascading drum solo whose wild fills, when combined with muted synth buzz, suggested John Bonham sitting in with Oneohtrix Point Never. It was the perfect foil for Kuedo’s streamlined pulses: an epic showdown between human and machine.
That 2012 remix brought Claude Speeed to Planet Mu’s attention; now, on his first full album for the label (after a five-track EP in 2015), the same contrasts still guide his work. Toggling between ambient and noise, the album covers a lot of ground. “BCCCC” opens the record with fluttering arpeggios and a regal synthesizer melody channeling Boards of Canada and Hudson Mohawke—a flashback, perhaps, to his time on the LuckyMe label. But then “Serra” whips to the opposite end of the spectrum with a freeform sprawl of coruscating feedback that plays out like a gentler, more dulcet version of Merzbow’s Rainbow Electronics.
The rest of the album follows a twisting series of switchbacks between those two poles. After a series of high-pitched glitches, “Windows 95” morphs into what can only be described as a weaponized start-up chime. “Ambien Rave” sounds pretty much exactly like the title promises: beatless trance, cushioned in reverb, and floating six feet off the ground; he returns to the idea on “Fifth Fortress,” whose springy melody carries welcome echoes of the Knife’s Silent Shout. Even his simplest ideas are often pulled in multiple directions at once: beneath the sketch-like “XY Autostream” and “VZJD,” both lyrical ambient etudes, an undercurrent of distortion threatens to drag them into far more sinister territory. At the other end of the spectrum, “Alternative Histories,” featuring Kuedo, splits the difference between doom metal’s rumbling ambience and the spectral spray of Ligeti or Xenakis, and “Super 800 NYC,” crackling like a burning amplifier, might as well be a full-scale tribute to Sunn O))).
Sometimes, Speeed’s wandering interests have the effect of throwing the listener off balance. “Entering the Zone,” for instance, puts his yen for rock drumming into the service of a John Carpenter-like prog jam—a jarring contrast with the album’s more streamlined surfaces. That clash raises an interesting point: Unlike a lot of ambient-leaning electronic music, this doesn’t necessarily work as background listening: Its moods are too mercurial, its changes too nuanced. You need to be paying attention to really appreciate the subtle mutations in his sound, yet there’s also something about his queasy tones and grizzled frequencies that keep the listener at arm’s length, emotionally speaking. It’s a record that dares you not to get too close.
But maybe that’s all part of Speeed’s plan. In the press release, he talks about his interest in creating “an abstract space to process the oppression, confusion, and insanity of the contemporary age.” That’s a tall order, but his unsettling instrumental sketches do a good job of capturing a kind of restless, sourceless anxiety. And with the album’s final four tracks, a warm sun rises over his virtual world, and some of the more alienating trappings fall away. The slow, resonant “Center Tech” sounds like some strange musical interface linking digitized tympani with ocean waves; the lyrical “Spirits” and “Contact” show off his synthesizers in all their quicksilver glory. And on the closing “DreamDream,” a voice singing, “Dream,” is looped over his most ebullient melody, evocative, in its own way, of the Field and M83. It’s not at all where you might have expected the record to end up, but it makes for an awfully satisfying finale. Just as he did on his Kuedo remix, he’s kept his best card up his sleeve all along.
