Telexer – Outtatime
Can you really fear a monster if you’ve seen it photographed in glorious detail from every possible angle? Can you really muster the enthusiasm to fear the unknown if every step that you’ll take has been mapped out?
Modern music, and this goes for most genres, has the problem of being… a little too much in focus. Pop singers’ voices sound like someone is shouting at you from two meters away. And death metal guitars feel like someone playing an old computer keyboard.
What about the art of delivering the unexpected? What about making music that feels like it arrived at you, and was delivered to the world, by some bizarre mistake, like it escaped some laboratory? Telexer makes that kind of music.
That’s why, if you’re aching for days of getting your records from cool stores that imported all of their products from overseas lo-fi labels, Telexer’s “Outtatime” should be really pleasing. “Outtatime,” certainly, features a great old tune at the heart of it, one that you can even hum along. But there’s an intimacy to that fuzzy, lo-fi approach that a big label-produced, fancy studio-recorded single can’t produce. It lacks clarity, so that it can have magic to it.
Slow Code – I Don’t Listen to Music
The present tense and so is the future. And, it’s only the greatest artists that can properly relay the information. The rest of us just brush it off. The rest of us just find strategies to cover up our eyes and ears to the truth.
Worse still, most artists, because of the aforementioned reasons, make it a ritual to load up their work with as much information as possible. Pick up any ordinary pop hit, and you’ll be bombarded with a tremendous amount of sonic ideas going every which way.
But do those things move us closer to the truth, or further away from it? Why can’t we focus on a simple message, and why can’t most artists deliver it anymore? Slow Code, with the band’s emotionally raw, minimalist sound are a recipe against these things.
“I Don’t Listen to Music,” Slow Code’s most recent single, sounds like a tune written immediately following some kind of terrible disaster, some sort of event that’s scarred the author for life. Of course, there’s no need for trumpets or Slash’s guitar solos. No, much like the story captured in the lyrics, Slow Code’s best work involves silences.
