Ooh, this is pretty special. There has, let’s be honest, been slightly too much modular synth music floating around recently, much of it seemingly produced as part of some sort of retro hipster trend thing and not having anything very interesting add to the genre. But this is really good: innovative and intricate and involving, plus it sounds great.
It starts out with a repeating pattern of first four notes, which grows to five, then six, then a little echo is added, and so on — it feels like the music is developing as we listen to it as the result of some kind of evolutionary process of random mutation and natural selection… or possibly some sort of Close Encounters Of The Third Kind call-and-response thing. This sets the tone for the whole album, really, each track a thing of patterns morphing and growing in complexity, the aleatoric feel enhanced by frequent abrupt shifts in register, often several within a line. (The liner notes make all this quite a bit more explicit, with their talk of “generative entities”. I didn’t read them until I’d already formed my own impressions of the record, though, I promise, and I admit I’ve only skimmed them now.) But there’s something else very important to know about Patterns Of Consciousness, which is that it’s really melodic and really catchy. All those little tweaks and jumps… everything somehow sounds just exactly right. For a record with such an obvious theoretical underpinning, it sounds wonderfully natural. Honestly, this is close to perfection.
(Incidentally, there’s something interesting going on with the album structure, at least for the first three sides: each has two tracks, a jaunty up-tempo one followed by a slower and more contemplative one; the A-side is This Causes Consciousness To Fail followed by TCCTF, the B-side is Information Needed To Create An Entire Body followed by INTCAEB, the C-side is Scratches On The Readable Surface followed by SOTRS… I suspect there’s something deeper going on here, but I haven’t quite figured out what yet. The D-side, by the way, is a single long track called Gravity That Binds, and it’s great.)
I bought this from Juno. They call it Experimental / Electronic.
dogrando writes about some records 