FACT's John Calvert on Animal Collective's congested and digi-maxed-out Centipede Hz, a microcosm of the macrocosm that is netspace (a nonspace of absolute proximity)
"It’s as if by having every
tool and style of every era and nation available to them at the press of
a button has stripped AC’s world of its mystery; as if there’s nothing
more to discover."
"the cost
of such a dazzling feast of stimuli has been a certain element of
romance.... there’s just no room for the listener’s own imagination, rendering it a difficult album to connect with"
"with the American indie vanguard migrating over to electronica, a
shrinking force in songwriting has been the spaces between guitar
music’s adjoining parts. Spaces, or rather negative space, in which
mystery burgeoned, where atmosphere and by extension a sense of place
formed"
"... Centipede Hz‘s
overarching theme of enmeshed radio signals, spiralling intertwined
through space. The hitch is, you never get a sense of that infinite
space here, outer or otherwise, because space itself is in short supply... Centipede Hz plays out like another post-indie
meditation on information overload in the net-age; where the music,
packed and hyper eclectic, is pursuant to the concept. It carries the
same tenor of anxious joy struck by ‘post-everything’ icons Gang Gang
Dance"
a/k/a glutted and clotted
a/k/a Mourning "Becomes-Eclectic"
it's the Sound of Now (for a certain demographic / class / and it's the reason i can only hack about 20 minutes of KCRW before i have to flip to classic rock radio, flee to the clarity and punch of riff based Old Wave or New Wave
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