Max Eilbacher’s music can take control of you. As the bassist for champion rock deconstructionists Horse Lords, his in-the-pocket low-end licks align your body with the grid to push you straight through the band’s tiered polyrhythms and criss-crossed leads. Turn on his solo music and you might enter the opposite state: a catatonic stupor, eyes fully squinted, mouth agape, with no referents to latch onto. His collage-like compositions transcode any vestiges of identifiable sound sources into bristly mutations of their former selves. You zone out as you try to follow his twisted internal logic. You turn up the volume on the next playthrough to make sure you didn’t miss any clues and find that the piece has already reassigned a couple crucial cogs in your brain box.
The preview of Subtle Scatter, Eilbacher’s new LP available now from Fogged Records, excises three blown out minutes of modular synth squelches, garbled vocal samples, and hi-fi laptop glitchery for our pleasure. Feel free to grasp at the words, but don’t try too hard. Eilbacher would rather disfigure than divulge. In his hands, the stereo spread is an empty turtle-shaped sandbox waiting to be filled with oblong rubies, nails, torn scraps of paper, driftwood, and goos of various viscosities. And fill he does.
• Fogged Records: http://foggedrecords.blogspot.com
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