Pitchfork
63
Jacques Gaspard Biberkopf makes music for turbulent times. A Lithuanian producer with roots in Berlin’s club underground, his music—a liquid, digital audio collage of distressed electronics and manipulated field recordings—suits a world buffeted by technological disruption and tidal waves of capital. It isn’t dance music, exactly—too abstract, too spacious. But Biberkopf works with the club in mind, such spaces being, as he told FACT, “a total, immersive environment, rather than a stage with a predefined fourth wall.” Like, say, Hyperdub boss Kode9 or the Turner Prize winner Mark Leckey, Biberkopf straddles the worlds of dance music, art practice and academic theory, in search of something profound or meaningful to say about the times in which we live.
Ecologies II: Ecosystems of Excess is a sequel to his 2015 EP Ecologies, and continues with many of its themes. This is a sort of speculative fiction in sound, dealing with the dawning of the Anthropocene, defined by scholars as the epoch of humankind: one of mass extinction, climate change, deforestation, oceans choked with plastic. Biberkopf is into collapsing boundaries—between the real and the virtual, the organic and synthetic, the gallery and the club. At times, Ecosystems Of Excess gestures towards dance music: see the pulsating trance synths that cut through “Transfiguration I: Enlightenment”; or “New World Order,” with its thudding, pressurized beats and flicking halogen hats. Elsewhere, it feels like a 2016 update of music concrete, as pioneered by figures like Bernard Parmegiani or Pierre Schaeffer. Processed electronics intermingle with heavily treated field recordings, tracks stretch out into protracted drones or twitch with sudden jump-cuts, and everything collapses into texture.
The influence of critical theory and contemporary art runs throughout the record. The titles here—“Technocracy”, “Wetware”, “Eruption Of The Amorphous”—gesture to sci-fi and cyberpunk, or resemble chapter headings plucked from an ambitious philosophy Ph.D dissertation. The LP, meanwhile comes packaged with an art book by the design studio Maximage, in which surreal landscapes are overlaid with an essay by the writer Deforrest Brown Jr. that blurs the edges between academic theory and avant-garde poetry.
This aesthetic is echoed in the music, which appears to resist clear interpretation. On “Eruption of the Amorphous,” voice software recites hollow platitudes. In the depths of “From Infinity To Here,” you can discern snatches of narrative—the splash of water, the rattle of a subway car, distant sobbing—but try to piece it together and you end up lost. The best moments here are those that set out to fool the ear. “Preacher” samples an African-American minister and makes him sound like a vein-popping MC of the Def Jux school. “Realer Than Real,” meanwhile, employs that common trope of 21st Century club music: the crack of gunshots. In a moment of pleasing absurdity, though, it chooses to blend it with the sound of panicking geese and cocktail jazz piano.
Like recent records by Rabit and the Haxan Cloak, Ecosystems of Excess feels very tactile: you feel it as much as hear it. But its tone of high academic seriousness is something of a stumbling block. An artist like Holly Herndon works with similar conceptual ideas, but makes them feel like a playground, not a lecture. If there’s another 2016 work of art that feels of a piece with Ecosystems of Excess can be formally daring and grimly thrilling in its bold, dystopian vision. But it can feel rather enervating, inducing a sense of paralysis and alienation. Right now, just a glimpse of the way forward would be very welcome.
Thu Nov 17 06:00:00 GMT 2016