Another cassette from the likeable Leandro Barzabal, the Argentinean musician living in Paris just now. This fellow made quite a splash with his Bris De Clôture tape of sickening noise made with his custom synth, and scandalised polite society with his release Worst Guitar Playing where he showed exactly what he could do with an electric guitar (spoiler alert: it wasn’t a Van Halen imitation).
Quite different again is Monochrome Cabal Definition Monochrome Poem (TITANIA TAPES Tt16), all-electronic music which might or might not have originated on his own software, but is generally more restrained and less noisy. No less unsettling though. ‘Gaussian Acquisition’ is like a surreal moonlight stroll through an unknown city at 4AM, where the sickly light induces a vague hallucinatory state, and the figures in the distance aren’t humans at all, but some strange half-horse half-rodent mutation. I liken it to a “stroll” as there’s a vaguely human walking-type rhythm to these strange pulsations, but then to realise that metaphor completely you’d have to have a rubberised body with very relaxed tendons and ligaments, and each footfall would sink into the soft bubble-gum surface of the pavement. On the B side ‘Motifs Collaboratively Clusters’ the story has passed into a new chapter, and I feel we might be meeting one of the horse-rodent creatures face to face as we attempt to engage in a dialogue with this chimerical monster. The sounds issuing from its twisted beak-like snout are pure geometry, informed by a logic and directness that we humans seem to have abandoned a long time ago, in favour of communicating via SMS texts and WhatsApp messages. Indeed the very purity of this language is such that it can say more with a high-pitched monotone in five minutes than any politician or businessman can convey in their entire career, with their deceptive, slippery lips coated in grease.
“The instrument used for the conception of this album does not exist”, we are informed by Barzabal in his printed insert, as he goes on to speculate that sometimes things are better if they only exist in the imagination. After 40 minutes in the company of this unusual release, you’ll be inclined to agree with this speculative, existentialist world-view of his. From May 2023.