[A collaborative review; italics:
Jacob An Kittenplan; roman: Ryan Masteller]
“My desire is for you to stop being a fuck wad.” —Seth Graham
“No, seriously, stop being such a fuck wad.” —Seth Graham
“Gasp!” —the national media
“Damn, that’s a good idea.” —Seth Graham
The anger distilled into chaos. The chaos splattered with pink slime.
The slime-coated chaos sprinkled with jimmies. What melts in the minds of
humans hardens into EQ spikes, like the dying final breath of a bassoon
clicking with precise afterlife.
Seth Graham killed a bassoon. Let’s not lie to ourselves.
***
Master of juxtaposition, servant
of none, what hath “The Cream” (or was he “The Juice”?) paired seemingly
effortlessly this time around? Staccato and Legato, for sure, as percussive
scattershot slices and dices through most modest swaths of reverberating,
disembodied consonance. And surely acoustic classical instruments and
ccllaassssiicc MIDI culture and cheese get the brain all congested and
discombobulated, as does the electroacoustic phenomena wiggling all willy-nilly
alongside (Inside? As Above and So Below?) the equally dished out
electronically limited glitch?
***
Barfing classical music in a free-jazz whirlwind, Graham’s computer
somehow makes its music with Photoshop while jolting the maestro himself with
electricity, probing his mind and freezing his hands to the keyboard via 2400
watts of pure <em>juice</em>. Is the computer sentient? Is it
running Orange Milk Records? We have to ask these questions, you know. These
days it’s confusing to understand what is source and what is output, what is
composed and what is random.
But then again, Seth might just be having a go at us.
***
How, like, seriously playful? How
lethal said whimsy? How much “ITAKEITBACK” must a sonic posit make before being
completely forgotten? Such are the conundrums within the wizardrous mixing of Gasp.
***
That brain of yours has got to crack right down the middle, like a
boulder-battered windshield, before it can reconstitute any of this. Seth’s
laptop screen is a blank spider web of blunt force trauma, the contents of its
hard drive backed up to a lake where an entire orchestra wanders knee-deep in
the shallows, attempting to play from memory everything Seth’s ever created.
Don’t you get it? The orchestra is the hard drive!
***
Keep in mind that under zero
conditions could this album be actualized (with 80% fidelity) live.
***
And it’s soaking wet.
This is modern classical!
Brain, meet retooled functionality. Orchestra, meet your greatest
performative challenge.
***
One cannot pair the jangle of
pocketed pennies with fiercely pounded tympani, lest it be expertly curated.
***
When we have listened to ourselves, to our forebears and
contemporaries, we can eschew obligation – along with things such as
“structure” and “modern technology” – and metamorphose into that great
incandescent magma-like density, hovering without gravitational limits or buoyed
by heretofore unknown space-metal pinpricks. Such is the magic of the OM, that time and space are suspended to allow
for these timbral and dynamic extremes to parley, interweave,
s-t-r-u-g-g-l-e, crystalyyyze and, really, like, to really get the fuck down,
to get the fuck w-e-i-r-d, for the sake of psychoacoustic partying! And
there stands Gasp above the
pulverized remains of our former selves, heartstopping, jawbreaking joy in the
face of everlasting fuck wads. What is there to understand here? Smash the
bassoon! Gasp into the void!
-- Jacob An Kittenplan and Ryan Masteller
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