Sonic Robottom Burps
You're feeling weightless. Your body is lifted into the higher plains and your mind has been released into a state of ether. You hear your female companion gently asking you to 'wake up', but it is too late. With the power of first track 'Abiogenesis', you are floating down the river. But once you hit shore, you are cosmically transported into a car ad for the new Toyota that your new middle class neighbour is banging on about. And as if this musical journey couldn't get any worse, a couple are humping each other in slow motion, with 80s hair spray clogging up the back window vents and turning the back of the classy four-seater of tomorrow into a porn b-movie that has no story line and badly synched overdubs.
This is the sort of way we'll come to describe ambient electro music, now that analogies for said acts cross over each other all too often. Give it three years max and it will be the only way that journalists with short straws and time to kill will explain those musician guys that once gave it hard with acid and house in the 90's, but now release a decade worth of humming and sploshing noises that were randomly issued from their lobotomised PCs and are still unaware that they can produce far better sounds by placing a microphone under their lavatories or atop their hairdryers. For example, play 'Transmission/Intermission', sit back and relax to the sounds of a telly on the blink whilst your Mum dries her newly permed do.
Oh yeah, this stuff is GREAT to come down to after a heavy sesh on the mushes or pills or frantic power Yoga moment down at your local middle class yup-shop, but really, seriously, COME ON NOW! Isn't it time we started putting down the 'ethereal pads', dabbling with the 'organic echoes' or however else you want to classify this bunch of cod that you've happened to make by chance, by layering and layering block upon block on your music software package?
(You're feeling nauseous. You're going to throw up, all over your pink silk tie.)
It's one of those albums where the artwork and production/promotional delivery is actually a bonus and adds that little bit more impact to what Carbon Based Lifeforms are about. With whacked-out jellyfish and ambient hands and colours amongst an organic collage, the album art more than suggests what the music later states. Described by their 'people' as 'a strong sonic introspection mixing submarine perceptions with metropolitan climax,' you can almost see the rabid hand-yanking movement from underneath the desk as the new-wave bohemia place another overtly deep and meaningful tag onto another pointless and lacklustre piece of drivel.
Well done, guys.
The robots are moving around unnecessary components to their sleek, polished exterior, but all the noise, commotion and attention is in their posterior. The robots are making music. But it's coming out of their second-rudest piece of circuitry.
If you want random sounds, a lack of beats and the sort of audio that would come if you left a computer with a mechanised arm alone in a room for several days, then yes, this isn't too shoddy. But if you are one of those hard-faced persons that have become wise to how simple something like this is to execute and know that hundreds of identical acts are our there right now, clogging up the musical universe with blips and blops and clever beats (that are equally meaningless), you'll log off pretty quickly.