Label: Touch Format: CD
Richard H. Kirk is one of those electronic music producers who seems content to have found his groove, and stuck with it to good result for years, refining, developing, tweaking his sound palette into variations on themes he long ago helped pioneer in the justifiably lauded Cabaret Voltaire. As the title indicates, LoopStatic cycles its way though as many permutations of ring modulation as Kirk can imagine, and he’s had more experience than most with making a groove unwind itself and reform into something else along the way for good measure. Given the resonant properties of his chosen instrumentation, the ecstatic tones generated throughout are sinuous whorls of analogue synthesis, at once familiar and open to the additions and subtractions of beats and pieces, breaks and burbles. Phasing washes of pink noise, cluttered undertows of samples fragments, that sort of thing.
Above all, there is the politicised intent, the paranoiac edge of TV speak recursively referenced to show that the one thing about multimedia paranoia is that it’s usually justified. “Do You Transmit” he asks, and shoves in some hypertrophied breakbeats and pheumatic rhythms; reception is not always clear, the bombardment of voice and basskisck gets into the backbrain and sometimes even gets stuck there. In a loop. The rush generated is more amphetamine psychosis than E-fuelled blitzdance, with an urgent desire for shelter from the noise, but loving it too at the same time. They really are watching; all the time, even if it’s time-lapsed single frames per minute rates of bus-top observation and subway corner convex mirror surveillance.
Go to a club and the management have the authority to treat their audience as supsects; and maybe they are at that. Go to see Mr. Kirk at a squat party and he’d make you feel like that too. Edgy, never settling down, despite the repetition. “Chemicals And Easter Bunnies” are the pounded-in targets of the Christian Fundamentalist immoral minority, and Kirk likes nothing better than to lampoon them through the displaced sampling of their tirades, offsetting the knee-jerk beats with shivery coils of sinewave stutter for those who revel in bucking the preaher’s pompous teachings. Unlike the Industrial Dancers of old, the vocal loops are now deployed somewhat more carefully, and the message doesn’t rely so much on endless hammering repeats for effect, but on more subtle interaction with the rhythms and the pitch-bent silences. Millennial idolatry of Santa Claus and The Easter Bunny? On drugs? You betcha sickly-sweet Jesus it’s true, the decadent society is in full swing, and Richard Kirk is watching and recording…
-Freq1C-
