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______________________________________________________________________________.
OOO
Upon Cycles
______________________________________________________________________________.
.date Jan-31-2004
.style Techno
.label Planet Mu
.cat.no. ZIQ080CD
.source CDDA
.type Album
.quality VBRkbps 44.1hz Joint-Stereo
.size 75,5 MB
______________________________________________________________________________.
Only two circles are needed to form the sign for endless. The
possibilities for OOO aka Nicholas C. Raftis III are also endless. He
chose to build sounds into delicate, post-modern, complex structures of
what is only badly described as electronic music. Greatly talented with
the gift of almost intuitively finding the right beats and sounds to put
together, he stays with computer-generated sounds that range from old
keyboards to the fringes of power-electronics and the rhythm-bastards of
old Warp-records. All mashed into one big pile of beautiful art, like a
glass-tower or an ice-sculpture of the most fragile and filligrane
design. Yet never foregoing the pounding basses and the long-winding
floors of sounds. Everything moves, everything changes.
The fascination or even obsession of OOO with cycles and loops is a
funny thing, because even if the barely readable liner notes are all
about mystic/postmodern mathematics, about loops and repeats, about the
magic of zero and nothingness and whatever might come to a creative
mind, when thinking about the most interesting numbers (zero, one and
pi. Sometimes also three and five and also seven, but that is about it),
the music itself is neither very mathematical or repetitive. Actually,
ôupon cyclesö lives from the plain emotions and clear atmospheres of its
tracks. While zero and endless are fixed points with no movement
possible, the music of OOO û and actually everything else as well û
stretches across the vast place between those two points; which of
course is endless as well, so the logical circle closes again.
Semiotically the problem is none, though, because a space, even if it is
endless, might be described as an endless space, and thereby is
described. There you go, make of that what you will. I donÆt believe it
will help you any, except on late nights out and discussing about these
things under the influence of a variety of mind-supporting drugs, which
is the only place and time in which theories and statements like these
will make sense. Otherwise they are just brainfood.
OOO is the artistical moniker of one Nicholas C. Raftis III. and ôupon
cyclesö is his unbelievable debut. Unbelievable, because the sounds and
dynamics of these 16 tracks is so interesting and challenging, that I
would have expected them to come from some senior electronic musician
such as Autechre or Tennis. Then again, Planet Mu as the label of Mike
Paradinas aka ╡-zig is just as good as a starting place. Raftis is a
great talent in finding and arranging sounds that at the same time
chill, relax and startle the listener. Various things go on at once in
every track, everything seems to be moving in different directions, yet
you never feel any loose ends or anything but natural growth within
them. At the same time OOO manages to stay within a seemingly narrow
field of sounds and forms. It is the variation and complexity within a
designated and overseeable range of music, that makes ôupon cyclesö even
more challenging.
Techno has come a long way, and û as with almost every Planet Mu release
û I can hardly see a lot of people dancing or chilling to these sounds.
Nevertheless, IÆd like to hear the wobbling, low basses of ôNext level
of the treeö on the PA of a really big rave-club, preferably in an empty
hall and turned up really loud. (If you start to bang your head to that
track, you have definitely made another step away from
mainstream-listening-habits. Not even Timbaland or The Neptunes would
dream of using sounds like that for one of their
million-seller-productions.) I am a big fan of pounding, synthetic
bass-sounds, ever since Godflesh, but that is a whole different thing.
At the end, "next level of the tree" disintegrates into a wall of noise
and feedback filled with glass-chimes and the sound of whooshing fire.
That is the point every dance-floor gets deserted. On the other hand,
some sounds on ôupon cyclesö are so delicate and fragile that they would
demand headphone-listening.
The overall atmosphere is relaxed, yet single bits dance and jitter like
small bacterias under a microscope. The dissection doesn't destroy the
magic, quite the opposite, the aural senses are not able to follow the
whole spectrum of sounds at all times, but has to pick out some parts of
areas crowded with varying sounds. This is called the cocktail-party
effect, because even with a hundred people talking at once, your ears
and brains are able to follow what the person in front of you is saying.
So get hung up on the beats, then the blinking keys, then the noises in
the background, then the subtle organ in the back, then smile to the
almost happy sounds of ôturn indefinatelyö and so on and so on. "upon
cycles" is neither bips'n'bleeps nor laptop-music nor Aphex Twin (that
name just had to crop up somewhere), but a great mixture plus innovation
of these parts. When complexity stretches over a large field and is
looked at from great distance, the complexity vanishes and is replaced
by sympathy. (Another trick of mind of our sensory systems.) No other
music shows this more than electronic music. Let's get lost in zeros and
ones, bits and bites, god and electricity, basses and tweeters, 000 and
666.
P.S.: There are only ten kinds of people: those who understand binary
code and those who don't
______________________________________________________________________________.
01 3 Points... 03:53
02 Colour Ballet 03:17
03 _Root 03:52
04 Desper 03:51
05 Oments 02:12
06 Next Level Of the Tree 05:35
07 Take Flight 01:43
08 Seperation Definition 02:58
09 Coffee Shop Philosophy 04:06
10 Group Heartbeat 02:48
11 Clockwork Will 00:58
12 Turn Indefinately 01:53
13 Sexy Stickshifter 04:01
14 Kichigai Arukedo 03:55
15 All Through 02:11
16 Sleep Paralysis 07:26
. .
54:39 min
______________________________________________________________________________.
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: ███████▀██ rac - radial - sb - sfe - soup - sour - tr - ube
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