Imagine religious music by and for robots, constructed in digital trance
states by CPUs moved toward ecstatic altered states. That's Excepter, a
currently four-person NYC-based collective, whose improvised soundscapes
would haunt the outer reaches of freak-folk if they were not so very
clearly inorganic. Album credits for this EP list show every member —
founders John Fell Ryan and Dan Hougland, as well as newer members Nathan
Corbin and Jon Nicholson — manning various kinds of synths, drum boxes and
electronics, with only percussion and vocals derived from natural sources
(more or less, more on that later). Yet though the tools are metallic, the
sound is soul-stirring and transformative. This is psychedelic music in
its broadest sense, connoting not paisley shirts or druggy lyrics, but a
genuine gateway into other states of consciousness.
The five tracks for Sunbomber were laid to tape more or less live,
as always, bringing a drastically reconfigured Exceptor (minus earlier
members Macrae Semans, Calder Martin and Caitlin Cook, and plus Corbin and
Nicholson) together in a Catskills studio for the first time. The result is
a chaotic, multilayered sound, anchored by drum-machine rhythms and built
out of repetitive, sometimes conflicting patterns of voice, synthesizer,
field recordings and other instruments. It is the sort of sound where you
are never quite sure what is going on, which instruments are in use, what
time signature or key the piece is in, or what the singer is saying. The
vocals are particularly mysterious, for, while the tone is often completely
audible, the words never are. The moans and growls and intonations feel
disengaged and ghostly, an atmospheric that you might expect to anchor the
cuts in reality, but which, in fact, makes them even stranger.
The disc opens with "One More Try," emerging out of a series of long
twanging notes interspersed with computerized blips, the trill of some sort
of ethnic flute flicking in and out of view. This cut includes the disc's
most overt use of field recordings — you hear bits of laughter and
conversation in amongst the inorganic sounds, though so distantly that
you're never sure exactly what you're listening to. About a minute in, a
frayed, tired-sounding voice enters the mix, words indistinguishable, the
kind of voice that might be staggering home from a long night. This
initial cut has a gentle feeling, almost meditative, built as it is on high,
repetitive electronic tones and the shaman's weary intonations. There's a
slight drag to the cut, a trudging deceleration, as if the whole thing were
constantly in danger of slowing to a stop. "Second Chances," which
follows, is more chaotic and urgent, with its water-drop sounds against the
boom of ultra-low percussion. The sounds here come from every
direction, converging almost accidentally at the center. There's an
industrial clangor — sounds like dragging metals or escaping steam, power
drills or sonar blips — that subsides only at the end into a lovely
marimba-like motif.
The pace picks up even more with "Bridge Traffic," founded on a twitchy,
cymbal-shushed electro beat with bongo-ish percussion. Again, a wordless
voice plays off the electronic sounds, its timbre suggesting all those
human qualities — exhaustion, thought, hope and discouragement — that
can't
be conveyed so easily by electronic sounds. "Dawn Patrol" continues in
this vein, pitting a weird chant against speeding and slowing snare-like rhythms,
a mechanized groove that bunches and stretches like taffy. The final, title track
is more abstract and less shaped by rhythm than the others,
irregular in time signature, weaving multiple layers of sound. There are,
again, wordless incantations, growls and shaman moans, reverberating booms
and organ wheeze, Ligeti-ish hums of overtones. The organ emerges from
this tangle of sensations, spinning out sounds that
cross church-music overtures with slow strobe-lit dance cuts.
This is the kind of music that seems most impenetrable the first time you
hear it, then gradually reveals itself over repeated listens. There's a
lot going on. It doesn't always seem to fit together in any premeditated
way. Still, it creates strange juxtapositions and interesting textures that
change every time you listen.
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