Like anyone who spends quite a bit of time staring at inanimate objects attempting to figure them out, Loretta Aberdeen (aka Bryant Canelo) seems slightly suspicious of technology. As Lampgod, Canelo makes abstract, hip-hop productions, stitched together with played-to-death soul tapes and drum machine loops that seem to disintegrate as you listen to them. But under his Loretta Aberdeen alias, he makes work that is noisy and repetitious; he dares you turn it off, and freely admits that some songs “can also be too long for your enjoyment.” The terrain of his latest album, PHONE PHREAKER$ PHREAK BACK, is made up of ambient memories, distorted house skeletons, and spoken-word rants. It’s not so much exhausting as it is exhaustive, allowing Aberdeen to examine both his vulnerability and his distance from it.
Aberdeen obscures himself in clouds of beeps and minimal drum hits, clearing the air only to startle you with sudden declarations. Album opener “LUXCORE” is an icy landscape formed of otherworldly material; it’s digital firmament. As the song progresses, Aberdeen keeps hyping the track by saying, “Check it out, now.” It’s eerily disembodied, yet strangely immersive. His repetitions begin to have the effect of mantras, and the blistering, almost orchestral peals of distorted guitar that compete for your attention provide the track with a quasi-mystical character. It’s like looking at the human trapped in the machine.
Aberdeen ensconces you deep inside this sprawling consciousness-warping device, measuring your perception by messing with it. “MOLLYMAN” begins with Aberdeen humming, “Didn’t know I could love somebody/Didn’t know I could love someone like this” to a series of squeaks. This earnest proclamation leads into club-ready drum patterns, and the next set of lyrics fit this new setting: “You make me dance/Bring me up/Play it sweet/Make me move just like a freak/Mr. Mollyman, Mr. Mollyman hold up.” Here, dancing is only hinted at; it’s a track that feels closer to walking outside of a club than being inside one. Or to put it another way, it feels more like being in the head of someone preparing to meet a new lover at the club, the soundtrack to their imagined future made more abstract due to its distance from concrete reality. Like in “extra,” a song about fighting outside the club, Aberdeen is focused on manipulating the outside world’s sound so that it sounds both real and unreal, an inescapable hallucination. By bringing in the bass drum at odd intervals and looping together hollow-sounding reeds on “MOLLYMAN,” Aberdeen shows he is more interested in skewing with what you perceive than making you move.
This fixation with the mechanics of listening gives the album a hypnotic power. “BOOK,” flickers with electricity buffeted by static and scattered hi-hats. It sits somewhere on the scale between progressive electronic and noisy improv, and it evokes images of disintegrating cities with desolated architecture. The jittery “cinerama” feels playful and enervating in equal measure; it’s intriguing even if it never becomes immersive. The floating “STARR” sits right in the middle of that scale. At first, it’s easy to get lost in its warm, heady progressions, but the addition of a propulsive beat somehow turns what was once an engaging walk into an aimless hike.
In the liner notes for PHONE PHREAKER$ PHREAK BACK, Aberdeen says that when he was young, he got good at computer hacking, but what he was really interested was phone hacking or “phreaking.” He says that “a toy whistle that came in a captain crunch box” produced “a certain frequency that [could] be picked up by payphones to make free calls.” The founders of Apple were also avid phreakers, and received cash to create “blue boxes” that would allow the user to make free phone calls. Steve Jobs actually credits blue boxes for Apple’s existence. What was once a harmless bit of computer fun led to the creation of a multinational conglomerate that not only has the power to evade any sort of regulation, but also the ability to surveil many users of its products. Perhaps Aberdeen is right to distrust the digital. Technology manipulates memory the way it manipulates our data; we may think we are getting a deal because we can shitpost or send messages to faraway friends, but the forms we occupy are as limited as the protections we have over the content we send. Is there another way? Through his music, Aberdeen refuses to format himself in a way that can be easy to consume. If you hack his phone line, you’ll only hear static.
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