Louisville beatmaker and electronic composer Albinotron, or Matthew Sisk if you prefer, has been releasing enigmatic jams for closer to a decade. His latest work, Glitchwave Vol. 1 may be his most enterprising though. Not simply due to his individual ambition but what the work acknowledges about electronic music and the culture that surrounds it.
The tracks on Glitchwave consist of mostly crunchy soundcard contortions, defibrillated by chattering drum loops, and swathed with new age-inspired synthesizer hums that shift and billow like the mists of Avalon. The crisp and crinkly, laser-light illuminated nature of these sounds and their reliance on sophisticated electronic tools do not diminish the mystical aspects of the music though. In fact, the digitized nature of these sounds unveils a dialectical relationship of the music with its own sense of transcendence, ensuring that its eminence persists in proportion to the reductive appearance of its productive source. Translation: Glitchwave is as spiritually grounded as it is clearly moored in the processes of cybernetic exchange.
This tension is consistent with that which exists between the soul of electronic music and the technology required to make it, representing within the album a microcosm of the dynamic as it subsists throughout the culture of rave, dance, and certain varieties of experimental music. The album is illustrative of the fact that sometimes to expand your mind beyond the limits of your surroundings, or to connect with a higher sense of being, you sometimes need to engage an intermediary. The role of the medium has manifested through many forms of human artifice throughout time, with particular forms of dance-oriented music serving as the catalyst of spiritual transformation in the present day.
The aspect of Glitchwave that truly touches on the culture of electronic music as it presently and practically exists is Albinotron's enablement of, and an invitation to, collaboration. In the liner notes of the album, Albinotron states that they have no intention of writing the second volume of Glitchwave, despite bestowing this album with a presumptive sequential indicator, ie Vol. 1. Instead, this second chapter is left to the community of beatheads and electronic innovators who populate the web to write, if they so choose.
The community surrounding electronic music is not shy about the extent to which they borrow from each other or continue to build upon the progress made by their predecessors. Glitchwave Vol. 1 by virtue of its title and aesthetics, implicitly lays the first paved step in what could easily become a new path to a new micro-genre field. One which attempts to navigate and chart the uncertain terrain of frantic hip hop beats and stressed 8-bit tones, while submerged in a meditative and shamanistic atmosphere.
It's now up to someone else to determine the life and direction of what Albinotron has started here. Will that person be you? You could be if you desired to be. After all, Glitchwave is for everyone.
