It's an old saying that "There's a fine line between genius and insanity" and after diving deep within the audio output of one Matt Wand aka Small Rocks, I cogitate we lavatory safely suppose that Mr. Wand's passport is stamped and that he's been safely traveling between the two for quite some time now.
An ex-member of the cult band Stock, Hausen and Walkman, Wand has re-surfaced with another project on his Hot Air tag. While his website URL may be simplesampling.com, there's mothing simple on this CD. Instead Wand offers us a accumulation of experimental techno which sounds more like it was dissected and set back together again by Dr. Frankenstein rather than some Ibizian trance DJ.
Carbon Dating is a dark work, filled with granulose loops which morph and sputter out in a million unlike directions, all overlaid with industrial noises, glitches, 4 bit synth chords and other random noises all cut and pasted together to shape a complex series of loops and sequences. Mere mortals can make electronic music quite easily, yet to make something this complex and disturbing, you'd have to be from another place altogether.
"Rule Of Thumb" sounds almost aboriginal, as if a metallic jungle of metal trees came to life; it's stone elephants trumpeting their mating calls in the distance. "Some Minerals Have No Cleavage" takes on an old cheesy Hammond B3 iteration and then promptly mixes in a building situation. Einsturzende Neubauten would have been proud. "Carbon Dated", my favorite track here, begins with a puree of glitch and timestretched samples ahead rolling rashly down a hill, it's off-kilter jazz backbeat trying desperately to keep up. Don't even ask me about what's going on on "Martian Housing Crisis". This is the kind of music you would probably hear if the inmates took over the lunatic mental home disco.
While Wand was an integral theatrical role of Stock, Hausen and Walkman, this solo crusade shows off not only his control of studio trickery in ways that were never really explored before. His approach is often like that of John Oswald yet instead of victimisation other songs to word form the foundation of his plunderphonics, Wand uses the detiritus of machines.
"Carbon Dating" is without question one of the most interesting releases we've heard here in quite some time. It's worrying, it's weird, it's ludicrously catchy and it's completely insane. Keep out of reach of children, simply for the rest of you - go and find this at once.
Don't forget the straightjacket. You're going to need it.
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