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In the often austere world of experimental electro-dude-ism, Jeremy Dower's blindingly twee exercises in the most polymeric synthetic-retro-electro sounds come across as grotesquely cartoonish. His iridescent plinks and plocks power a bright yellow school bus filled with cutely drawn primary-school students through a primary-colored world-of-Nerf, en route to a day at the chocolate factory. The brittle p.a. speakers on the bus crackle out something sounding not unlike the piped-through house Muzak of a Taiwanese department store. But the jingle-worthy journey soon gives way to a cocoa-beanie'd sugar buzz you can't believe is coming during sanctioned school hours, with Jeremy jumping right into the vat of chocolate, laying on the syrupy Casiotonic keytone with affected childlike naïveté. The affectation obscures the fact that his excursions in chocolatey archaic electro kitsch are as studiously conceived as the most earnest of conceptual sound-art experiments. In contrast to his most tonally close counterparts Plone, Warp's UK keytone trio, Dower's use of the most Muzakist keytone kitsch isn't the beginning and end of his aesthetic; his erected poly/synth visages of cutesy cartooning have little to do with pop-song format or, for that matter, actual thematic cuteness. Whereas most similar music is sheer nostalgic reverence for one's childhood, Dower is sentimental for things that have yet to happen; his inverted retro-futurist future-retroism tries to divine future time by affecting the unaffected gaze of a child. And he probably wants to be an astronaut.
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