Music For Granular Synthesizer – connect_icut (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

Never judge a book by its cover but both the title of this album, the wordiness of the track names and even the name of the artist in all its lower case glory are clear sign posts that what follows is going to be something a bit left field, a bit special, totally unique. connect_icut makes music, if indeed it is music in the conventional sense, which aims to blur lines. Lines between instinct and intellect, chaos and order, organic and synthetic, analogue and digital and the result is something which pretty much is defined by what it is breaking away from. It is post-digital, post-electro, post-song even and though built of melodic threads it feels more like an art-piece, a sound installation, an acoustic experiment.

But then again who defines what music is, who gets to set the limits of where it can go, which boundaries are pushed? A four-four beat and some throw away lyrics might conform to a lot of peoples definition but out on the fringes new ideas are being explored, experiments in tonal music, fluid sound washes, structureless expressionism and glitchy distractions.

The opening brace of songs Uridium and Laureline brim with hypnotic subtleties, drawn out threads of sound and slow-burning intrigue and at the other extreme Haernwerthwr is a claustrophobic bundle of sparks and energy and pulsing electronica. But it is not an album that should be seen as a collection of tracks, in the same what that art is not just a collection of colours and shapes. Music For Granular Sythesizer is more about abstraction and texture but it is also about something much bigger, it is about exploring the edges of music, finding out what is beyond once you have pushed that boundary to its accepted limits, it is about music as art and about the total questioning of what music can even be. Now that is what I call thinking big.