Binary Beautiful – CodedScott (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

I’m old enough to remember when synths and samples began to be subsumed into modern music-making. It caused a riff, and no mistake, and you had to make a choice, it seemed, as to where you stood on the issue. You could be one of those ageing rockers who said that guitars were the only way forward and that these new technologies would destroy music. (The 19th-century Luddites wielded the same argument.) Or you could be more broad-minded about things and wait to see where these new developments took us.

I always stood in the latter camp and erred on the side of progress. It has to be good that the more colours in the box, the more inspiring the pictures we could paint and the more vivid our future visions might be. And I think I was right, and Binary Beautiful is just one of those myriad pictures that only exist because of the embrace of those technologies.

It’s a tune that revels in the minutiae of ones and zeroes being corraled into musical harmony, smooth bass pulses, and buoyant beats. A track that wanders between ambient soundscapes and chilled dance experiments. A warped version of electronic pop being subsumed under warm, yet somehow clinical, creation—a triumph of math and melody, man and machine.

Listening to such strange binary soundscapes and beguiling, otherworldly sonics, it’s hard to imagine what people feared. The future is always arriving. And some of it sounds like this!