Marc Spruit from the Netherlands arrives with his latest release Synthetic (NO LABEL), six compacted episodes of his craft made in 2022-2023. As noted with his previous releases, his method involves manipulation of cut-up and edited sounds – it’s just that he gets that little bit bolder and more disjunctive with each release. On this occasion the pre-recorded sounds have been truncated and arranged before being passed to his “digital decks”, where, after so much labour-intensive editing with the virtual knife, he lets rip with more spontaneous mixology-type actions – at least I think so, assuming that’s what he means by “improvised”. Even so, the results are static and dull. Spruit is in danger of losing himself inside the computer; the sounds he makes are increasingly inhuman, abstract, random, and – well, just plain ordinary. I can make out the gestural sweeps and admit there’s a certain frisson from the unexpected contrasting swoops that are bouncing around on the hard drive, but any aesthetic value is rendered almost null by the sheer incoherence of it all. (17/04/2023)
