When Jar Moff dropped Commercial Mouth back in December, a short album preview soundtracked the release trailer. The video shot four minutes of audio across an assortment of subtitled TV drama, Rambo fight scenes, arm wrestles, and 80s hair loops. There’s an old chap talking on different color telephones; I think he’s gambling — he has a deck of cards and a small girl with him. The footage represented a lack of concentration, an affirmation of channel hopping or broadcast epilepsy, of having something to gawp at no matter what, a 2D technistatic plaything. The music not so much as accompanied this jamboree of daytime lowlights, but was embedded deep within it, picking up on the abstract scramble of content assorted in a standardized frequency pole vault.
Jar Moff is an artist from Athens, where he grew up, went to college, and befriended Bill Kouligas. Since then, he has deposited a compact batch of online mixes, released an EP on Mathewdavid’s Leaving Records, and hammered out a Grosskopf reworking for the RVNG Re-Synthesist project. Kouligas studied in London before moving on to Berlin where he established his PAN label and subsequently distributed Commercial Mouth. It’s a striking debut that flaunts the curiosity of an artist willing to crosshatch hip-hop, jazz, and noise with a bungled library of sounds and stylistic reference points.
patisiwn moutra is a sample-based mix that follows in the footsteps of Moff’s tried and tested sound collage formula. Whereas the 2012 Vimeo piece played into whatever role digital channel hopping might encompass in the home, this jam sounds a lot more personal, as though it has been carefully assembled for private playback. However, the disjointed edge it shares with the video encompasses a gaping insight into methods of consumption; it’s a musing on the average SoundCloud forage, ad hoc YouTube binge, and half-digested snippet fidget — it’s like a terabyte iPod shuffle compressed into 17 minutes of mashup that’s guided by an invisible human hand. Colin Stetson is sensually massaged into a cesspool of trigger clicks, ruffled beards, and heavy riffage, but the mix is so attentively executed that no gain could come from wryly name dropping the panoply of styles and effects that are tackled here. My suggestion is that you check this out for yourself; embrace the surge, open another dozen tabs on your browser, click every hyperlink in sight, and seep into Jar Moff’s manic caress.
• Jar Moff: http://twitter.com/Jar_Moff
• PAN: http://www.pan-act.com
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