Albert Einstein’s image is mugging, tongue out and hair wild, on every 3rd grade science lab wall. Einstein is now pop culture, one of the lucky few not rendered effectively faceless as humanity continues to plow forward through time, uprooting most things in its path, with only the occasional glance backwards and a sheepish “whoops, I think we needed that.”
The hulking, driving, and seemingly implacable forces of progress and history have been given form with Laureate’s Minute Detail. Throbbing, scraping, and pounding rhythms force each of the tracks forward towards some impending but still unknown outcome. Industrious might be a more applicable word than “industrial,” as every song on this cassette feels far more systematically generated than consciously created; as if it just sprung up as a natural by-product of the existence of factories and machines. This automatic, inhuman quality to the music may be exactly the point: the tracks have the dates and reasons for awarding the Nobel Prize for Physics but not the names of those awarded. The X-Ray and the discovery of energy quanta, basically the foundation for quantum physics, are hugely important, but could you pick Max Planck, Wilhelm Röntgen, or Max von Laue out of a lineup? The machinery has already been fabricated and continues to turn, even while its creators have been relegated to names and dates in history books.
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