As a human, the thing I generally like most about music is its ingrained humanity. The way in which the thoughts, intentions, and world view of the people who make the music come out in its aesthetics and the expression of form. How every note and rhythm is attributable to some human interaction with an instrument, that person's environment, or even their own body. That said, even though I enjoy it, I don't have access to these simple pleasures when it comes to electronic producer Esse Ran's LP Derelict Memories. The record is a slimy and compulsive variety of hard techno that ungulates widely according to a covert design that I can not fully decern or comprehend. The grooves build and iterate on themselves like a mutant lifeform, molting in its scally epidermis, shedding its husk, and emerging as something ugly and compelling after hot, quivering gestation. The record feels like the result of Esse Ran having seeded some bass notes in a petri dish and let the cultures grow and amass in accord with some otherworldly calling, and periodically fertilized with protean powder, nitrate-infused water, and his own sweat and tears of pride. The product of his labor is a perpetually ripening monstrosity always on the verge of another revolutionary, self-annihilating unmasking. It's alien but not alienating, in that I can certainly decern some intelligence behind the maneuvers of this dancing, mucusy, bio-metallurgic mutant, but its ends are not our ends. As a human, I can only appreciate the form it takes. I can not decipher its wants or objectives.
