#as they happen and are recontextualized throughout through this dissonance.

[therevengeoffrankenstein]

the key to understanding 'gray' is the dissonance between how the author knows that socialism is the doorway to utopia/happiness and how the narrator is on the precipice of this realization for most of/the entire book, up until (and, depending on how you interpret the text, including) the final page.

'gray' is a story of two star-crossed lovers who were *largely being torn apart by the oppressive capitalist society of american culture and the cure to this was them being freed from their worldly 'responsibilities' by death.

i'm always struck by how open-ended the ending is on whether or not the narrator merely hallucinates re-uniting with Her or actually does die in that tour bus bunk and walk off into the 'sunrise' (the specification of 'sunrise' (the dawning of a new day, a new beginning) vs. the traditional 'walking off into the sunset' (symbolizing closure, an ending) is even more striking and supportive of this reading) of the afterlife with Her.

*asterisk here because i am well aware that there is a lot more to the evil machinations of capitalist society than just the baseline of the economy and careers. lol. it permeates/corrupts all facets of life under it.

one of the things that is encouraged under capitalism, for example, is misogyny/the patriarchy. which is another thing largely at fault for the failures of the main relationship in 'gray' and i am not trying to undermine that fact.

[shevour]

some thoughts on illyra's character throughout the acts, based on the ' good end ' run i just finished .

ACT I : a fractured shell of a person, if she ever was fully human to begin with. there is nothing in her skull that makes sense, other than the cruel and desperate urge for blood. she is scarcely interested in her new companions and finds the new weight of her impending doom more of a bother than an actual threat. the parasite isn't of immediate concern to her, her own identity is. and then poor alfira. there it is on her hands again, and despite the horror of her own depravity, she knows she enjoyed it. illyra is forthcoming in what she's done, and though will not speak outwardly, moved in the group's decision to back her despite it.

backing the grove was a decision made out of necessity rather than any heroism. what halsin had offered her was of more use than minthara's promise of power — she would not be trapped under the thumb of the absolute. it was a matter of ' fate ' as her own apathy to anyone other than herself during this time would go unchecked and abandoned. she needed a way forward, and used the resources of the grove and residual tiefling assets to make it to the shadow lands in one piece.

ACT II : the journey to moonrise towers is a turning point. illyra is now forced to recognize that she is a pawn to a greater power, and the haunting feeling of her own powerlessness drives her to act like a cornered animal. she is not a treat to be around, and further delving into her own issues warrants combatted remarks and a luring disdain from her. it's not until reaching the mindflayer colony underneath the towers that she finally gets a glimpse of the answers she's been searching for. reuniting with kressa and putting names and faces to the people that did this to her channels some divine rage on her part and decimates them — and for the first time: the blood on her hands doesn't make her feel any better.

delving further into the colony, she recognizes orin near immediately. not enough to come to the conclusion of their history together, but enough to piece together that orin was an instrument in her downfall. plainly put, she lets her own dissonance lead her through the battle with ketheric and comes out the other side no more whole than where she started. she is frustrated. she is mad. she wants her mind back. it's here her willingness to help the emperor materializes, and the threat of the absolute finally descends into something she should care about.

for the romance specific durge scene upon refusing to kill isobel, resisting her own urges to preserve a connection and care for someone other than herself is a big step. it's an incredibly vulnerable moment for her and the first successful time she's defied a power that has long since acted as her own will. the morning after she is very quick to avoid the party in question / even going as far to try to end things between them. even after the reassurance she is still weird about it and distant for a time depending on who the romanceable character is. girls when they are faced with the mortifying ordeal of being known <///3

ACT III : arriving in baldur's gate is the final push she needs to understand just what happened to her. gortash recontextualizing their past together was just the icing on the cake. delving into the undercity is an entire journey awash with new memory — this was her city. these were her people. stepping into her old haunting ground hails a pressure to revert back to her former glory like no other, the very walls crusted over with her previous reign. and before now, there was no perspective. she served her god and father as she was born to and relished in the praise it brought from him. she was his chosen. his favorite. now, though — with the weight of people other than bhaal and his council backing her, it all feels ill - fitting.

shadowheart, astarion, lae'zel, karlach. each defied their masters and chose a path they themselves could forge. was this really a choice for her too ? to give up a century of power in exchange to finally live as her own person rather than a pawn at the whim of a malevolent god . . . defying her father was as much freeing as it was agonizing ; severing the ties to her past for good in much the same way she was created. illyra was born in blood — it was only fitting she die in it too.

her sins are her own now. bhaal will no longer dictate her actualization — and she has felt her own will for the first time in her life. resurrection leaves her in a lurid state of being, and illyra is now free to roam in new blood, body and mind. there is nothing left of the scion she once was, ripped apart by her own maker until the husk of her body grew cold and reborn into a clean slate. it's a new beginning, and one she intends to take by the horns. all that's left now is to be free of the parasite and the rule of the absolute, which after a long road is finally feasible and within reach. she is not trading one master for another, and the final decision to destroy the netherbrain is made with little hesitation.

her conclusion sees her part ways with the main party. there is a lot she needs to re - discover ( and discover ) about herself and the grand journeys made with them aren't a priority now with the tadpole gone. it is not the end of a relationship, though. just a pause. there is so much for her to sort through that she needs to find her place among others before beginning to entertain the thought of living amongst them.

a romantic partner is very different, given that the amount of trust she would have in them by this point would have her depend on them in a way unlike anything she has ever experienced. their life together would be their own, and she would make sure to preserve it well. her loyalties are now more of a personal concoction, and all the devotion and commitment shown to her former cause now lies at the feet of the one she loves.

you'll find her now delving through the depths of the underdark, looking for that severed connection to her drow heritage and hoping to scrape away any insight into an already decimated memory. there was always more to her than existing solely as bhaal's vessel, she just hopes to find it one day.

[dustedmagazine]

Slept Ons: The Best Records of 2020 That We Never Got Around To

Tattoos and shorts! How did we miss the Oily Boys?

It happens pretty much every year.  After much fussing and second-guessing, the year-end list gets finalized, set in stone really, encapsulating 12 months of enthusiastic listening, and surely these are the best ten records anyone could find, right? Right?  And then, a day or a week later, someone else puts up their list or records their year-end radio show, and there it is, the record you could have loved and pushed and written about…if only you’d known about it.  My self-kick in the shins came during Joe Belock’s 2020 round-up on WFMU when he played the Chats.  Others on our staff knew, earlier on, that they weren’t writing about records they loved for whatever reason — work, family, mp3 overload, etc. Except now they are.  Here.  Now. Enjoy.  

Contributors include me (Jennifer Kelly), Eric McDowell, Jonathan Shaw, Justin Cober-Lake, Bill Meyer, Bryon Hayes, Ian Mathers, Andrew Forell, Michael Rosenstein and Patrick Masterson. 

The Chats — High Risk Behavior (Bargain Bin)

High Risk Behaviour by The Chats

Cartoonishly primitive and gleefully out of luck, The Chats hurl Molotov cocktails of punk, bright and exploding even as they come. They’re from Australia, which totally makes sense; there’s a sunny, health-care-subsidized, devil-may-care vibe to their down-on-their luck stories. Musically, the songs are stripped down like Billy Childish, sped up like the Ramones, brute simple like Eddy Current Suppression Ring. Most of them are about alcohol: drinking, being drunk, getting arrested for being drunk, eating while drunk…etc. etc. But there’s an art to singing about getting hammered, and few manage the butt-headed conviction of “Drunk & Disorderly.” Its jungle rhythms, vicious, saw-toothed bass, quick knife jabs of guitar frame an all-hands drum-shocked chant: “Relaxation, mood alteration, boredom leads to intoxication.” Later singer Eamon Sandwith cuts right to the point about romance with the couplet, “I was cautious, double wrapped, but still I got the clap.” The album’s highlights include the most belligerently glorious song ever about cyber-fraud in “Identity Theft,” whose shout along chorus buoys you up, even as the dark web drains your savings account dry. The album strings together a laundry list of dead-end, unfortunate situations, one after another truly hopeless developments, but nonetheless it explodes with joy. Bandcamp says the guitar player has already left—so you’re too late to see the Chats live—but it must have been fun while it lasted.

Jennifer Kelly

Oliver Coates — skins n slime  (RVNG Intl)

skins n slime by Oliver Coates

2020 was a year of loss, of losing, of feeling lost. Whether weathering the despair of illness and death, the discomfort of displacement or the drift of temporal reverie, English cellist Oliver Coates creates music to reflect all this and more on skins n slime. Using modulators, loops and effects, Coates employs elements from drone, shoegaze and industrial to extend the range of the cello and conjure otherworldly sounds of crushing intensity and great beauty. Beneath the layering, distortion and dissonance, the human element remains strong. The tactility of fingers and bow on strings and the expressive essence of tone form the core of Coates composition and performance. If his experiments seem a willful swipe at the restrictions of the classical world from whence he came, the visceral power of a track like “Reunification 2018”, which hunkers in the same netherworld as anything by Deathprod or Lawrence English, the liminal, static bedecked ache of “Honey” and the unadorned minimalism of “Caretaker Part 1 (Breathing)” are works of a serious talent. skins n slime is an album to sit with and soak in; allow it to percolate and permeate and you’ll find yourself forgetting the outside world, if only for a while.  

Andrew Forell  

Bertrand Denzler / Antonin Gerbal — Sbatax (Umlaut Records)

Sbatax by Denzler - Gerbal

Tenor sax player Bertrand Denzler and drummer Antonin Gerbal released this duo recording last summer which slipped under the radar of many listeners. Denzler is as likely to be heard these days composing and performing pieces by others in the French ensemble ONCEIM, playing solo, or in settings for quiet improvisation. But he’s been burning it up as a free jazz player for years now as well. Gerbal also casts a broad net, as a member of ONCEIM, deconstructing free bop in the group Peeping Tom, or recontextualizing the music of Ahmed Abdul-Malik along with Pat Thomas, Joel Grip and Seymour Wright in the group Ahmed amongst many other projects. The two have worked together in a variety of contexts for a decade now, recording a fantastic duo back in 2014. Sbatax, recorded five years later at a live performance in Berlin is a worthy follow-up.  

Gerbal attacks his kit with ferocity out of the gate, with slashing cymbals and thundering kit, cascading along with drubbing momentum. Denzler charges in with a husky, jagged, repeated motif which he loops and teases apart, matching the caterwauling vigor of his partner straightaway. Over the course of this 40-minute outing, one can hear the two lock in, coursing forward with mounting intensity. Denzler increasingly peppers his playing with trenchant blasts and rasping salvos, riding along on Gerbal’s torrential fusillades. Throughout, one can hear the two dive deep in to free jazz traditions while shaping the arc of the improvisation with an acute ear toward the overall form of the piece. Midway through, Denzler steps back for a torrid drum solo, then jumps back in with renewed dynamism as the two ride waves of commanding potency and focus to a rousing conclusion, goaded on by the cheering audience. Anyone wondering whether there is still life in the tenor/drum duo format should dig this one up.  

Michael Rosenstein

Kaelin Ellis — After Thoughts (self-released)

After Thoughts by KAELIN ELLIS

To be sure, “slept on” hardly characterizes Kaelin Ellis in 2020. After a trickle of lone tracks in the first months of the year, a Twitter video posted by the 23-year-old producer and multi-instrumentalist caught the attention of Lupe Fiasco, quickly precipitating the joint EP House. It’s a catchy story from any number of angles — the star-powered “discovery” of a young talent, the interconnectedness of the digital age, the silver linings of the COVID-19 pandemic — but it risks overshadowing Ellis’s two 2020 solo records: Moments, released in the lead-up to House, and After Thoughts, released in October. It doesn’t help that each album’s dozen tracks scarcely add up to as many minutes, or that the producer’s titles deliberately downplay the results. And some, of course, will judge these jazzy, deeply soulful beats only against their potential as platforms for some other, more extroverted artist. “I’d like to think I’m a jack of all trades,” Ellis told one interviewer, “but in all honesty my specialty is creating a space for others to stand out.”

Yet as with all small, good things, there’s reward in savoring these miniatures on their own terms, and After Thoughts in particular proved an unexpected retreat from last fall’s anxieties. Ellis has a poet’s gift for distillation and juxtaposition, a director’s knack for pathos and dramatic sequencing — powers that combine to somehow render a fully realized world. As fleeting as it is, Ellis’s work communicates a generosity of care and concentration, opening a space for others not just to stand out but also to settle in.

Eric McDowell   

Lloyd Miller with Ian Camp and Adam Michael Terry — At the Ends of the World

At the Ends of the World by Lloyd Miller with Ian Camp and Adam Michael Terry

Miller and company fuse the feel of a contemporary classical concert with eastern modalities and instrumentation. The recordings sound live off the floor, and give a welcome sense of space and detail to the sensitive playing. Miller has explored the intersection between Persian and other cultural traditions and jazz through the lens of academic scholarship and recorded output since the 1960s. With this release, the performances linger in a space where vibe is as important as compositional structure. The results revel in the beauty when seemingly unrelated musical ideas emerge together in the same moment, with startling results.

Arthur Krumins

 Oily Boys — Cro Memory Grin (Cool Death)

Cro Memory Grin by Oily Boys

The title of this 2020 LP by Australian punks Oily Boys sounds like a pun on “Cro-Magnon,” an outmoded scientific name for early humans. It’s apt: the music is smarter than knuckle-dragger beatdown or run-of-the-mill powerviolence, but still driven by a rancorous, id-bound savagery. The smarts are just perceptible enough to keep things pretty interesting. Some of the noisier, droning and semi-melodic stretches of Cro Memory Grin recall the records made by the Men (especially Leave Home) before they decided to try to make like Uncle Tupelo, or some lesser version of the Hold Steady. Oily Boys inhabit a darker sensibility, and their music is more profoundly bonkers than anything those other bands got up to. Aggro, discordant punk; flagellating hardcore burners; psych-rock-adjacent sonic exorcisms — you get it all, sometimes in a single five-minute passage of Cro Memory Grin (check out the sequence from “Lizard Scheme” to “Heat Harmony” to “Stick Him.” Yikes). A bunch of the tunes spill over into one another, feedback and sustain jumping the gap from one track to the next, which gives the record a live vibe. It feels volatile and sweaty. The ill intent and unmitigated nastiness accumulate into a palpable force, tainting the air and leaving stains on your tee shirt. Oily Boys have been kicking around Sydney’s punk scene since at least 2014, but this is their first full-length record. One hopes they can continue to play with this degree of possessed abandon without completing burning themselves to down to smoldering cinders. At least long enough to record some more music.

Jonathan Shaw

 Dougie Poole — The Freelancer's Blues (Wharf Cat)

The Freelancer's Blues by Dougie Poole

A cursory listen might misconstrue the heart of Dougie Poole's second album, The Freelancer's Blues. When he mixes his wobbly country sound with lyrics like those in “Vaping on the Job,” it sounds like genre play, a smirking look at millennial life through an urban cowboy's vintage sound. Poole does target a particular set of issues, but mapping them with his own slightly psychedelic country comes with very little of the postmodern itch. His characters feel just as troubled as anyone coming out of 1970s Nashville, and as Poole explores these lives with wit and empathy, the songs quickly find their resonance.

The album, though it wouldn't reach for pretentious terms, carries an existential problem at its center. Poole circles around the fundamental void: work deadens, relocation doesn't help, spiritual pursuits falter, intelligence burdens, and even the drugs don't help. When Poole finally gets the title track, the preceding album gives his confession extra weight, a mix of life's strictures and personal limitation combining for a crisis best avoided but wonderfully shared. The Freelancer's Blues comes rich in Nashville tradition but finds an ideal fit in its contemporary place, likely providing a soundtrack for a variety of times and spaces yet to come.

Justin Cober-Lake

 Schlippenbach Quartett — Three Nails Left (Corbett Vs. Dempsey)

You might say that this record has been slept on twice. The second recording to be released by the Alexander von Schlippenbach, Evan Parker and Paul Lovens (augmented this time by Peter Kowald) was released in 1975, and didn’t get a second pressing — on vinyl — until 2019. So, Corbett Vs. Dempsey stepped up last summer, it had never been on CD. But this writer was so stumped on how to relate how intense, startling, and unlike any other free improvisation it was and is, that he just… slept on it. Until now. Even if you know this band, if you don’t know this album, well, it’s time you got acquainted.

Bill Meyer 

Stonegrass — Stonegrass (Cosmic Range)

STONEGRASS by Stonegrass

Released on the cusp of a tentative re-opening for the city of Toronto after two months of lock-down, this slab of psychedelic funk-rock was the perfect antidote to the COVID blues when it arrived at the tail end of a Spring spent in near-isolation. The jam sessions that became Stonegrass were also a new beginning for multi-instrumentalist Matthew “Doc” Dunn and drummer Jay Anderson, who reignited a spirit of collaboration after a decade of sonic estrangement following the demise of their Spiritual Sky Blues Band project. Listening to these songs, you’d never know they spent any time apart. The tight, bottom-wagging jams on offer are evidence that these two are joined together at the third eye. Anderson’s grooves run deep, and Dunn — whether he’s traipsing along on guitar, keys or flutes — is right there with him. There’s enough fuzz here to satiate the heads, but the real treat here is the rhythmic interplay. Strap in and prepare to get down. 

Bryon Hayes 

 Bob Vylan — We Live Here EP (Venn Records)

Bob Vylan flew under the radar in 2020 successfully enough that when someone nominated them for the best of 2020 poll in Tom Ewing’s Peoples’ Pop Polls project on Twitter (each month a different year or category gets voted on in World Cup-style brackets, it’s great fun and only occasionally maddening), most of the reaction was “is that one a typo?” Nobody had that response after listening to “We Live Here” — my wife also participates in the poll, so we just play all the candidates in our apartment, and Bob Vylan was the first time both of our jaws dropped in amazement; the song got played about ten times in a row at that point. Bobby (vocals/guitar/production) and Bobbie (drums/“spiritual inspiration”) Vylan’s 18-minute EP lives up to that title track, fireball after fireball aimed directly at the corrupt, crumbling, racist state that seems utterly indifferent to human suffering unless there’s profit in it. Whether it’s the raging catharsis of the title track or the cool, precise hostility of “Lynch Your Leaders,” Bob Vylan have made something vital and essential here, that very much speaks to 2020 but sadly will stay relevant long past it.  

Ian Mathers

 Working Men’s Club — Working Men’s Club (Heavenly Recordings)

It’s been evident these past few years that I’ve retreated from music and committed myself to the slower world of books as a way of giving my mind a break from the accelerating madness outside, but I could never really leave my radio family the same way I could never really leave Dusted. Another great example why: A fellow CHIRP volunteer played “John Cooper Clarke” in a December Zoom social I actually managed to catch, and I’ve been addicted to Working Men’s Club’s debut LP from October ever since. The quartet hails from Todmodren, a market town you won’t be surprised upon listening to discover is roughly equidistant between Leeds and Manchester; the album screams Hacienda vibes in its seamless integration of post-punk signifiers and dancefloor style. It’s easy to bandy about names from Rip It Up and Start Again or even The Velvet Underground in 12-minute closer “Angel,” certainly one of the most arresting tracks of the year, but the thing that struck me immediately is that this was the record I’d always anticipated but never got from Factory Floor — smart, aloof and occasionally calculated, yet still fun enough to play for any crowd itching to move. Until the community of a dance party or Working Men’s Club live set is once again possible, patience and a fully formed first album will have to suffice. You’ll have to imagine the part where I corner you at the party to rave about it, I’m afraid.

Patrick Masterson

[tinymixtapes]

Music Review: Giant Claw - Soft Channel

Giant Claw Soft Channel [Orange Milk; 2017] Rating: 4.5/5 “Rather amazingly, people are still saying things like ‘this sounds like the internet.’” – Nick James Scavo That Giant Claw unmistakably does sound like the internet and that chamber-residing analogues like Sean McCann (usually, rhetorically) do not exposes a dichotomy at play in how we collectively imagine and critically enforce what “post-internet” music essentially sounds like or looks like. In a sphere of interest increasingly shaped by digitization, saying something “sounds like the internet” narrows our critical vocabulary, focuses our gaze on certain familiar fixtures in rooms that may be hiding masterworks of elephantine architecture in plain sight, and allows for a kind of velvet rope policing that admits certain aesthetics into our Museum of Internet while appropriating liminal aesthetics into smaller World Exhibitions or back into obscurity. Characterizing a generation of music based on its preferred and accessible building materials (R&B and pop samples, clips of recognizable software noises, and MIDI instruments à la James Ferraro and Holly Herndon) and linear spacial acquisition narratives (hyper-local hangouts into ostensibly utopian digital planes) obscures a rich and global history of interpolation, emergence, and techno-liberation. By employing this term “post-internet” as a valid qualifier for music that is not only made possible by the internet but also somehow sounds like its coursing invisibility, critics are missing what makes individual works interesting and potentially liberating as they move through time, uniquely interacting with structures critics so often use to define them. Soft Channel, in its rigor and variegation, resists simple temporal and stylistic classifications, stretching through its complexities tired ways of thinking about how the internet interacts with daily life. Soft Channel follows 2015’s Deep Thoughts and 2014’s DARK WEB and expands upon their themes of authorship, authenticity, information overload, interruption, and cultural determinism while also compositionally blurring lines between curatorial values that we associate with “post-internet” composition and classical values of dynamism and sentimentality. Crucially, Soft Channel’s contrasts between pop culture referents (I think I heard Adele in “Soft Channel 001” somewhere?) and all those fluttering orchestral swells that punctuate them illuminate more about how we interact with collision than it does this particular convergence itself. Much how late-19th-century American composer Charles Ives combined popular American music and church hymns with experimental music techniques, Keith Rankin (an ex-TMT contributor) is continuing a rich tradition of combining pop standards with “art music;” it just so happens that his memetic referents are reproduced here through digital means. While this context is certainly somewhat unique in a larger scheme of instrumental music — like how an oil painting of this piece with a dimly-lit laptop in its frame would stand out in a gallery of landscapes, portraits, and decorative still lives — what’s remarkable here is Soft Channel’s sporadic composition, rich texture, and stark contrasts. This is chiaroscurotronica, high-contrast experimental electronic art, an updated, sonic extension of Joseph Wright of Derby’s high-contrast paintings exploring an Enlightenment-era Europe torn between religion’s mystical appeal and science’s bold promises. If Soft Channel is bound by temporal context, it’s that its subject is 21st-century anxiety over our own socially-constructed sense of dissonance between alchemical solutions and calculated innovations. However, critically foregrounding this anxiety’s supposed cause — namely, increased computation — eclipses what individual works like Soft Channel illuminate about how we deal with information overload as it impacts our daily functions. If my experience with Giant Claw’s music, especially Soft Channel, clarifies anything about how consumers can make sense of this trend of fast-accumulating data smog, it’s that we can (and naturally often do) offset it by recontextualizing ostensibly disparate referents so that they fit together in a way that affirms humanity’s proclivity for embracing both logic and sentiment. Soft Channel diffuses this darkening cloud of information by disrupting it through juxtaposition of classical composition with software-generated indeterminacy and aestheticizing its resultant patterns. But this shorthand of marking certain modes of expression “post-internet” has implications for critical shortsightedness. Reducing info-chaos as a theme into a recognizable stylistic category instead of studying each expression’s particularities privileges listening strategies that rely heavily on stereotype over details that, in any one case, could obfuscate, subvert, affirm, problematize, or completely misalign with our first impressions. Like all structural frameworks, this grouping of certain works together based on how or when they are compiled makes us focus on what’s replicated or shared between these works, not what is distinctive about how each interacts with its environment through time. For example, Soft Channel feels profoundly different than its MIDI-heavy predecessor, Deep Thoughts. Simon Chandler, in his review of Deep Thoughts, calls it “some kind of musical isolation tank,” offering, “its synthetic removal of almost every point of reference dispossesses the listener of pretty much every point of departure for her thoughts.” Its appeal, then, is in its lack of familiar referents, facilitating a free association of deep thoughts on our part as listeners and as critics. In contrast, Soft Channel is brimming with cultural referents dispersed through fragmented voice, not unlike ADR’s R&B- and choral-inspired Throat. “Soft Channel 003” is Soft Channel in microcosm; it starts with an undulation of static that culminates in a short burst of voice and strings, promptly interrupted by a period of silence. This pattern of sound-bursts (both acoustic and electronic) that are abruptly cut-off by periods of silence continues throughout, each fragmented phrase stripped of resolution. “Soft Channel 004” is less interruptive, yet arguably even tenser, as thunderous strings comprise most of its bulk. Both tracks are unsettling for profoundly different reasons: “003” because of its perpetual lack of resolve, “004” because of its oppressive orchestral cadenzas. Both, incidentally, are built on samples, which is far from a new practice. In his 1985 essay “Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as Compositional Prerogative,” John Oswald asks, “Can the sounding materials that inspire composition be sometimes considered compositions themselves? Is the piano the musical creation of Bartolommeo Cristofori (1655-1731) or merely the vehicle engineered by him for Ludwig Van and others to manoeuver (sic) through their musical territory?” As merely a “post-internet” work, Soft Channel is an extension of Oswald’s groundbreaking (and crucial) Plunderphonics and Plexure records, yet as a cohesive work with its own inspirations and themes (soft as an abbreviation for both software and softness), its effect is much more profound than its function as an ear-stretching tool or as simply an example of a compositional prerogative fulfilled. Through a structuralist lens, works that cosmetically seem preoccupied with information proliferation in a digital world (and thus purportedly share a common interest in digital naturalization) lose dimension. What is even more problematic, however, is that “post-internet” as a category often excludes individuals and communities of artists that its prescribers imagine lack meaningful access, when in reality, these same individuals and communities are either participating in ways that are still seen as fringe (or “folk”) or cut out of this conversation entirely. Undoubtedly, the internet has had profound effects on how information is processed and disseminated, but there remains inequity between who this innovation actually impacts positively and whose art is perceived as demonstrating its pervasiveness. Piratón Records’s essential new compilation No hay más fruta que la nuestra 2, for example, comprises records from female hip-hop, electronic, and lo-fi artists from Central and South America and is crucially missed in contemporary discussions of “post-internet” work, despite that its political aim is against male-dominated curation and its distribution is solely digital. Even though Giant Claw has consistently been laden with this tag, Soft Channel’s diverse referents and compositions work against narrow distinctions that denote certain kinds of expressions as digitally native and others as digitally developing. By drawing from a wide palette of sounds, Rankin profanes classical music and elevates electronic music without cheapening Soft Channel’s themes through quirky postmodern means. “Soft Channel 006,” which ushers in an end suite of sorts, is moving because of Rankin’s direction; it begins with a plucked cello phrase that recalls Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 in G before a cavalcade of synthesized noises join in counterpoint, complicating its composition without interrupting it. Following its increasingly-jumbled yet spirited progression suggests that another theme of Soft Channel is how changing technology impacts our search for meaning in new noises. Closers “Soft Channel 007” and “Soft Channel 008,” a seamless collage of breaths, arias, echoes, melismatic trails, and skipping-CD sounds foregrounds a struggle between climax and malfunction, burying vaporwave’s exposed wires in the debris of human perseverance. Ultimately, Soft Channel is Rankin’s most ambitious work; its compositional complexity actively challenges our structuralist labels, its intentional use of juxtaposition focuses attention on its themes of working through and with new information, and its variety of antecedents and compositional strategies challenges how certain categories exclude and further marginalize expressions and works from a productive and equitable conversation. Rather amazingly (though not surprisingly), Rankin has succeeded at pushing us past his limits as a composer and musician, challenging how we can make sense of noise in Replica’s silicon wake. Soft Channel brings us out of the DARK WEB, solidifies our wandering Deep Thoughts, and softens our resolve, even as its own breath is left suspended in mid-air, between lung and screen, where it retains its purest form. http://j.mp/2w2nrNP