Joseph White - (The Game is) Hypnosis

ATTN:Magazine

(The Game is) Hypnosis by Joseph White

Released on Gold Bolus Recordings.

On paper, (The Game is) Hypnosis reads like a thoroughly agitating listen: a twitching overstimulant, moving in spurts and flits and fumbles, like insects scrabbling to escape a bath on the fill. “Bees” is riddled with pops and crackles of interference, akin to lying beneath a road-gritting truck; “78” is an argument between two circuit-bent arcade machines. There are repeats everywhere and nowhere – samples of voices, organs, guitars, drums and objects are flung through stammering rhythms that never replicate exactly, meaning that the record is a constant assault of the novel, the new, the unforeseen, sabotaging the powers of prediction. Aesthetically the record captures that feeling of setting down for sleep only to find the brain still firing on all cylinders, darting manically between the dwindling day’s array of stubborn agitations.

So why does it ultimately hit like something serene? White states that the album is “built from electronic processes informed by natural patterns and phenomena”. It often feels reminiscent of microscopic organic processes like mitosis in animal cells, with instruments rendered in an uneven stop-motion. It feels anything but digital – instead I picture weird little machines of matchsticks and elastic bands, rotating in cartoonish herky-jerks for no particular purpose other than to resist the allure of stillness. Noise is everywhere – clicks, rattles, sputters – and it arrives like a nanoscale head massage, tapping against my temples and actually tempers my more manic brain activity through an ironic mimicry of it.

The melodies can be haphazard (the shivering vibraphone chimes on “Crawl Inside A Bell”, the stampeding waltz of “The Chandelier”) but also straight-up beautiful; the chord changes on “Final Lap” occur at a glacial pace, like the slow qigong-sweep of a hand, even as it’s chauffeured by thousands of tiny stutters; “Prancing” is like a quaint major-key fanfare announcing the charge of a dozen toy horses. This collision of fast and slow feels satisfying on an instinctive level, perhaps due to our deep-set understanding that even sleeping bodies are hives of tiny commotions. What looks like chaos on first glance is actually the sight of everything as it should be, atomically speaking.