This may sound odd coming from someone who is in the process of writing a review of an "experimental" music artist's album, but I really adore melody. It's one of the aspects of music that I cherish the most, even when it comes to avant-garde works. This confession may seem especially odd when it comes to the praise I'm about to bestow on Philadelphia sound assembler Andy Loebs and their most recent LP Hyperlink Anamorphosis. Odd, because it's definitely not their most cleanly flowing or melodic effort to date. While previous LPs like Focus Shape Ascend and Flexuous Vertex emphasized clearly defined, although consistently porous, patterns that take root and extend their tendrils before blossoming into a fresh cache of luxurious fixations, Hyperlink Anamorphosis is much more playful and unrestrained in presentments, even if the approach to recording the album was far more concentrated and pragmatic. In an attempt to echo the acknowledged limitations of a live performance while affording its potential for spontaneity, Andy centered their efforts for this release on prospects offered by the Korg Electribe 2's bombastic stock sounds and presets, slicing and slotting these cockamamie curios through the layers of other sound collages to animate a dialectical skirmish between what could be a sentient Nokia flip-phone and an antagonistic soundboard operator at a nationally-broadcast NBA game- a sputterphonic plunder of decaying technology, longing to gain ascendance in new digital flesh, clawing it's way to heaven so that's its mangled anatomy may assume a dazzling sublimity when viewed from the chaos out of which it had managed to scale. The release is a bit of a Frankenstein for sure, but one with a vein of groovy gold circulating through its abnormal physiognomy, discernable to those who are willing to embrace the twists and tangents of its cross-stitched topography, enriching their senses with novel degrees of incursion within crystalline dimensions.
