| In a world of million-dollar advertising budgets for "garage" bands, slickly marketed teen idols, and expensive producers who can make a blonde bimbo's singing voice passable faster than you can say "Holy ProTools, Batman!", electronic music remains the great leveller. Sure, having money and fame helps, but it's perfectly possible to make a record that sounds just as professional and sophisticated as a megastar using consumer grade equipment in the privacy of your own bedroom. Which is exactly what Zachary Mastoon, AKA Caural, has done with "Remembering Today". Most of this stuff has a real DIY-vibe to it, yet it's still as polished and sharp as anything you'd expect from one of the greats of the genre. Mastoon has quite professionally spliced together a hybrid of glitch, hip-hop, and IDM that shows that he has no shortage of ideas, even if his sound does get a little too abstract and busy at times. If he's mastered anything though, Mastoon is the master of the beat, and he loads this album up full of good ones. Much like Massive Attack, the music is for the most part very simple, relying only on the beat and perhaps some snippets of melody here and there to give it bones. Unlike Massive Attack though, rather than making fully formed songs out of these ingredients, everything sounds as if it's been cut up and rearranged in no particular order. Opening track I'm Way Too High, for instance, uses occasional bursts of harsh, dissonant, trilled noise to open the album with a punch. They'll Make A Video Game Out Of Killing People Like You takes the gimmicky of using 8-bit video game like samples in it, but for once this actually works pretty well, making the track something a bit more solid than a mere novelty effort. On the other hand, there's nearly completely ambient tracks like Entre Chien Et Loup, which glides along accompanied by a gentle chiming pulse and what sounds like almost random bass licks. This album is not going to propel Caural to stratospheric superstardom, it's far too abstract and occasionally alienating to achieve that. Much like the cover art, it's occasionally too busy as well, cramming more ideas into a track than there is room for. But the rest of the time, this is a pretty impressive effort, that showcases Mastoon's considerable musical strengths while staying away from trying to do too much. Definitely worth a listen for fans of glitch and ambient IDM. - Halo-17 |
1XLP/Out Of Print