Genre: Electronica Year: 2003 Country: USA Official Site: Lopside Details: Tracks & Audio Label: Self-published
A lot of instrumental electronica populated with beeps, blips and bloops—which could sound glittery and pleasant—can become sinister and dark. Future Sound of London and Aphex Twin schooled me in this. Even R2-D2 has a dark side, apparently.
The most interesting thing about Lopside's electronic foray here in 37 is the accessibility and humanity of the arrangements and sounds, which according to a press release were inspired by noise from Lopside's Dean Hinds' pager. If Future Sound of London wrote a soundtrack in Dead Cities for the vestigial currents of electricity in a metropolis that was crumbled and alone, here I think Lopside invites listeners to find out what the lights, appliances and power lines everywhere around us in places full of people might sound like. When human voices finally show up on the album as sounds at a party at the end of track two (why name it, especially since the last track on the album is titled "Titling instrumental tracks seems ridiculous"?), they couldn't feel more appropriate. Aphex Twin has always so cleverly employed beats that are just a bit too fast and intricate to be human; the beats and the repetitive chords here are easy enough, warm enough to be fully human. Someone could beat them out on a drum around a fire.
Best of all, despite all its electronic sounds, 37 doesn't grow grindingly nihilistic, like an instrumental from a Nine Inch Nails album, or dirge-like with minor chords, like Future Sound of London.
37 feels like what it is: A musician playing with the electronic genre, its keyboards and distorted instruments, to create soundscrapes for the background of peoples' lives with machines all around us, not dominating us and dehumanizing us, but mirroring us and sharing with us the best of their sound and soul.
If machines HAVE souls, that is. And that's another discussion altogether.
37 is, then, a warm moment of humanity in a genre of often dance-able, listenable, but dehumanizing electronica. In utilitarian terms, most of it is gentle enough to fall asleep to, playful enough to think by and cute enough to smile for.
P.S. For those curious about the album title, read what Lopside's Dean Hinds had to say in a press release: "I received a hand-me-down pager as a gift from a friend who complained that I was too difficult to get a hold of. My unwillingness to use such a device was only further enforced by the pager's erratic behavior, the pager's voicemail frequently filling with unintelligible messages. On one particular afternoon I received 37 voicemail messages, all of them inhuman beeps, buzzes, and other random bursts of electronic noise. I recorded the messages, and those sounds later became the basis for many of the tracks on 37."
Whether that pager was trying to convey something to Hinds, or whether he took complete nonsense and made sense of it is for you to decide.
Lopside 37
