DoF
If more than twenty people laugh, it wasn’t funny
CD, Highpoint Lowlife
The
infosheet to this release brings up the question of how to differentiate
between good and bad electronic music? Or rather, between original and
progressive electronica and the late-comer wanna-be crap that is filling the
stacks of records and CDs in your local specialist-shop? Interesting
question, indeed. Mainly because whatever you conceive as progressive or new
is not as much depending on what is being produced worldwide (and you
won’t ever be able to know all the music there is, never, not even close,
even though some of you act as if they did…) but more on what you know and
have listened to. For someone who has grown up on classical music, even
top40-charts might sound revolutionary, wild and crazy. Finally, I’d come
to an pragmatic answer: listen to the music in the store and if you like it,
what do you care if it is old or new, progressive or done before? As long as
you keep an open ear and an open mind, there might be a beautiful surprise
right around the corner waiting for you.
Such
as DoF. An electronic artist from Philadelphia who connects his abilities
with being exposed to the extra-terrestrial rays of a meteor that landed in
his backgarden. Well, that is a good story at last. Aside from that, he has
found a new and very interesting kind of crossover for his debut album –
consequently called “If more than 20 people laugh, it wasn’t funny.”
Each of the 11 tracks follows the same intricate and flimsy pattern of
putting a soft, harmonic layer of acoustic instruments (guitars, flutes,
organs, and so on) back to back with a deconstructed track of postmodern
clickery. And then letting these two opposed layers intertwine, fight,
mingle and twingle, which makes up for a very remarkable listening indeed.
It is like putting human or organic sounds into the cold cut-up atmospheres
of electronica and vice versa. Nature versus the computer, analogue versus
digital. And the experiment works out. Sometimes the two parts complement
each other, at other times they contrast each other harshly. Maybe some
might find a whole album of this kind of experimentalism a little to
long-winded, and there isn’t a lot of concrete variation within these
tracks. The real variation lies in very minor changes in atmosphere,
otherwise the whole contrast would get lost. You just have to listen closely
to get them, to realize how these minor changes effect the whole track. Or
that the electronic-part of track 5 “inefficient nothing” doesn’t come
from a separate track, but from playing the acoustic instruments backwards.
And when was the last time you heard an acoustic guitar being strummed on an
electronica-clickery-album?
