Hi, Ryan here, with a public service announcement.
Are you tired of music …
— let me finish —
… that’s really boring? I am too — I mean, I truly am. You can regularly find me in my office, smashing the latest high-tech playback gadget or super-expensive speaker to smithereens because of the boring music that trickles out the majority of the time, sending me into an uncontrollable rage. I mean, talk about first-world problems! Everybody’s pretty much an adult baby, just like me.
But there’s something about Matthew Ryals, something about the music that he makes that calms the inner rampaging bear and tweaks the “Interesting” dial on my internal music-criticism radar. Not content to bludgeon us with crass beats or slather us with saccharine melodies, Ryals instead combines the two concepts, then adds a dash of “experimental” to the mix to ratchet up the ol’ attention span and lengthen its involvement in the act of “listening to music.” The result is Machine Memory (Oxtail Recordings), a human/cyborg transmission that filters the emotion of the human experience through the cold circuitry of electronics.
Like a newly animated droid coming to terms with the novelty self-awareness and placement within all of existence, Machine Memory overflows with conceptual tactics aimed at the heart but rooted in the feet, specifically the rhythmic movements brought on by continuous jolts of electricity. It bubbles with glee and abandon, and sinks its hooks into you until you forget whether you’re more machine or human, or maybe both, or maybe a new species of evolved AI, or maybe WALL-E.
Robots of the world, jiggle till your joints rattle!
This public service announcement has been brought to you by Tiny Mix Tapes, the letter “M,” and the number “4.”
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