Wound - Plasticene

A Closer Listen

This cassette has me thinking a lot about plastic, not only because the tape is about plastic, but because it’s released in a plastic shell.  Plasticene is one of three releases from the brand new okla records, based in Krakow, and leaving nothing to chance, Wound is the pseudonym for founder Bartosz Szturgiewicz.  The label is currently accepting demos, but don’t expect this window to last for long as folks will soon discover a great new home for leftfield music!

The label calls the Plasticene era “a silent witness to mankind’s worst ideas.”  Plastic dominates land fills, creates a new island in the Pacific, and runs through our bodies, a thought unimaginable until recent years. Like it or not, today we are all part plastic.  The album exposes this and other “new horrors and old terrors,” emphasizing the ways in which humanity gets so much so wrong.  And synthesizer is the perfect instrument to emphasize artificiality, standing in contrast to the field recordings which decorate the album, first heard in the waves of the opener.  A spoken sample speaks of the toxic properties of the modern age, although with a modicum of hope, a hint that something might still be done.

Wound’s music, a blend of ambient and electronic, was once thought futuristic, but today this futurism has soured into consumerism.  The hint of electric organ sings of “real” things copied, plasticized.  “Sefing on Mars” is an amusing title, as SEFING is the company behind the metal and thermoplastic polyurethane cases for iPhones.  The word is close to “selfie,” and one can imagine a modern visitor to Mars taking a selfie and leaving the case behind.  Not that we’re any stranger to space pollution; the new shooting stars are pieces of discarded devices orbiting our atmosphere.

“Noctalgia” seems to refer to a nostalgia for nights of old, during which one was able to see the stars.  The track sparkles like neon lights and street lamps, florescent signs and spotlights, light pollution that affects migration, mating and sleep.  The music, like the lights, like the plastic, only seems innocuous, disguising a deeper danger.  The return of the birds in “Plasticene II” comes as a surprise: we have grown so accustomed to the unnatural that the natural seems an intrusion.

As the album ends in a vocal loop, rewound and replayed, the concept of reality is questioned.  Is the cassette prophesying its own demise, crushed into fragments that wash into the seas and find their way back into the bloodstreams of listeners and performers?  And if so, is this not the last, most fatal loop?  (Richard Allen)