Broken Thoughts - Realign

A Closer Listen

Once again, an album cover helps to draw us into the record.  Frédéric Fontenoy’s eerily manipulated art is as alien as the industrial music it advertises.  While we’ve seen the stretched image technique used in videos by Hiroshi Kondo and Mukai Jumpei, this is the first time we’ve seen it showcased on an album.  If one thinks of Autechre and Aphex Twin, all the better, as the work of Keju Luo (Broken Thoughts) honors their output, while crediting Hecq and Ulver as additional influences.

Realign offers something old and something new:  a “realignment” of material collected over the past two years.  Sculpting these fragments into new shapes, Luo bends and twists, wrings and ties.  Glass breaks, static hisses, bass rumbles.  All of this occurs within a lattice of beats.  This is music for dark moods, menacing yet intelligent: the worst kind of threat.  One imagines an artificial intelligence realizing its potential:  Ex Machina‘s Ava set loose upon the world.  In “losslessness”, the conflict becomes overt: the human, represented by the piano, set against the machine, represented by the beeps.  One side represents warmth, the other, cold calculation.

The further one goes into the set, the more the organic becomes subservient to the inorganic.  Water gurgles in “douglas firs”, a track whose title may remind some of Christmas; but after these trees are watered, they turn metallic and sharp like Warlock of the New Mutants.  Underneath the metal, there’s still a heart, but cowed.  “Richard Harrow” pushes the idea even further.  The title recalls the disfigured character from Boardwalk Empire who wears a tin mask to hide his scars.  The tone of the track implies beauty in ugliness, or perhaps the beauty of ugliness: the strange nobility of the misshapen.  This has always been the appeal of industrial music: the implication that the discarded refuse, the dregs of the earth, have a home.  Broken Thoughts carries its moniker to a natural conclusion, with broken beats and broken samples.  The closing piece, “things kept falling”, copies the percussive error of a glitchy CD-R, melding its tempo to cool, clean, mechanical buzzes.  The finale’s melodic theme suggests that things might someday be different, but for now, we are meant to live in a fractured world, to pursue beauty through its glitches rather than attempting to escape them.  (Richard Allen)

ATTN:Magazine

Something is waking up. Realign conjures the twitching of fingers coming into consciousness, or the blurred sights of recalibrating eyes, or those deep, galvanising breaths taken prior to the first physical movements of the day. Rhythms emerge as expectant flickers and lurching, part-built electronic loops, while drones roll in like waves of dry ice. The creaks of doors reactivating their stiff, long-dormant hinges. I hear the clunks and hammers of factory assembly. The beeps of self-activating machinery. Yet there’s also the sense that something terrible is imminent. The music is rife with ticks and skitters that flinch anxiously, goaded into a state of survivalist high-alert by the bass frequencies that churn, like disaster coming to boil, deep beneath the beats. The catastrophe itself never arrives and it doesn’t have to; instead, Realign exists in a state of persistent escalation, forever renewing its vague prophecy into a more profoundly unsettling form, concealing its most unwholesome imagery within the ever-thinning margins of absence and restraint.

So much of this record is implied and never physically delivered. The “melodies”, if one could even term them as such, are skeletal fragments that beg for embellishment: pianos slumping spaciously between three notes, synthesiser lines unfurled into clouds of vague shape, harmonies that mimic bagpipes pitched down by a laconic two octaves. Each track is a sentence unfinished; a half-thought rolling off the edge of an ellipsis…an invite to mine the unfathomable depths of shadowy insinuation. While the theme of the album is never explicitly stated, I’m often carried into thoughts on the imminent sentience of Artificial Intelligence: the potential consequences, both wonderful and unsettling, of robots that transcend their dependence on us. All the while, Realign is awakening itself, with life-force crystallising between the regulatory beeps and whirrs of hydraulic limb, outstretching into an ominous unknown.