The hardest-charging of synth obsessive Seth Haley's many projects, Com Truise debuted in June with a free download release of this very EP. Bolstered by a nascent fanbase from Haley's other concerns (the woodsy Boards of Canada revivalism of Sarin Sunday, the chewy instrumental hip-hop of Airliner, and SYSTM's frazzled electro), a retro-drenched series of mixes released under the Komputer Cast banner, and eventual remixes for fellow 80s flag-wavers Neon Indian and Twin Shadow, Truise built up a modest buzz, enough to be noticed by the folks at Ghostly. Remastered and re-packaged alongside four new bonus tracks, this reissue marks Haley's debut for the label, and immediately foregrounds him as one of the most interesting and promising producers to mine the weird intersection between 80s computer music nostalgia and proggy, electronic funk.
If we gave awards to musicians for art direction, Haley would be a lock for Best Newcomer. From the shock of red-orange and the Designers Republic-friendly flourishes that grace his official site through to his expertly refer- and rever-ential artwork sleeves, one might conclude that Haley's an aesthete, and certainly meticulous. This is relevant insofar as Com Truise's music also gives the impression of being immaculately designed. In the particular world of synthesizer music, everything is iterative, and a sound can always be pushed. This means that doubt is always around the corner, and finished tracks are frequently slowed by anxiety over whether they've been adjusted to paramount effect. Haley, you can tell, knows exactly what he's going for and exactly how to get it.
His detractors might argue that this is because he isn't working from his own vision at all. If there's a knock on Haley, it's that his music is too easily reducible to its influences, and that those influences are as decipherable as the source of his spoonerized pseudonym. It will, for example, be very difficult for anyone to write about this EP without mentioning Boards of Canada's Geogaddi, many of whose more uptempo, tremulous moments are echoed within, most notably on the pulsing synth swirls of tracks like "Tripyra" and "Sundriped". That there is generally a nostalgia angle being worked here probably also doesn't help.
And yet, as you move between the burned out shimmer of "Slow Peels" to the lurching, stutter-stepped prog of "BASF Ace", it scarcely feels like it matters; while a lot of Cyanide Sisters very patently tugs at the archetypes around electronic music and prog and nostalgia and the 80s, it does so with a muscle, gnarliness, and craft that makes it difficult to deny. In other moments, like the classical guitar sampling "Norkuy" and the vocal-led "Pyragony", Truise steps far enough out of character to suggest he's got plenty of other tricks up his sleeve. According to Ghostly, there's a proper full-length due later this year, so it won't be long before we have a better sense of Truise's path. Even if he just kept on mining this particular vein, though, he'd still be better than most.
