Bary Center is the Mark Williams of his time, and he also happens to
share a body, mind, apartment, effects rig, laptop, and some blood and guts and
stuff with Williams, because Bary Center is Mark Williams and Mark Williams is
the maestro, the Bary Center of his time. They share time, too. To get to the
point, it doesn’t matter whose name is on the cassette’s J-card (it’s Bary
Center’s) – what matters is how masterfully the maestro is going to deconstruct
electronic and techno music this time around. What matters is how you’re going to feel after you’ve been subjected to
a full-length album from a dude who knows how to make it happen, anytime,
anywhere. I’ve told you before, because I’ve written about his Speaker Footage release
Stop
Believing, and if you’ve been paying attention and doing your homework,
you know that you’ll be in for something pretty rad.
If Stop Believing was the
imperative to Williams’s audience, then Just
Dust is the pagan freedom of unending darkness that follows it, the
existential status update of supreme discontent. …Wrapped, of course, in an
eminently digestible package of inventive beats and melodies, no matter how
black the vibe ends up being. Only total immersion will suffice – once you’re
strapped in to Just Dust (or vice
versa), you’ll be whisked away to an underground reality where you and you
alone are there, and each passing second burrows itself deeper into your own
mind until you’re only aware of yourself, the darkness, the emptiness, and time
itself passing. But, like, in a fun way! That’s what good artists are able to
do, anyway – gussy up that disenchantment in a palatable form so that it feels like it’s directed at you and at
you alone, but in reality an entire audience equally disillusioned by modern
living is able to appreciate it. So, you’re alone, you’re upset about that but
you wallow in it, you listen to Bary Center et
voila – you’re not alone! But you’re still upset, only it’s about that now, and you wish you could go on
wallowing in your own crapulence instead of obsessively checking the
ever-growing list of people in the Bary Center chatroom. Are chatrooms even a
thing anymore? Doesn’t matter. Just Dust is
pulsing in your life and there’s no more room for regret. We’ve ceased
dependence on outmoded concepts. We’ve embraced the gritty future. Diving in
now, headlong.
--Ryan Masteller
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