Written by: Mike Dimitriou
This one is for dedicated fans and musicians with trained ears for radical synthesized sonic experiments.
Samuel Macklin is a Vancouver-based British-expat who uses the connect-icut moniker as his signature on his musical wanderings. Actually, for Macklin, it’s all about synthetic experiments of an artistic interest that swings from drone music to experimental and radical synthetic psychedelia.
His 6-track LP Music For Granular Synthesizer was recently released by Aagoo Records. The record sounds strange–chaotic but orderly where Macklin explores intellectual improvisation with some extreme sonic motions. Each track is an autonomous sonic expedition with a mixture of melodic elements and rarefied musical abstraction that falls somewhere between Tangerine Dream’s Alpha Centauri and the work of Aphex Twin.
Whereas other electronic music producers making the software/hardware switch have simultaneously adopted an analogue-only approach, connect_icut remains firmly rooted in the digital realm. And though the record has some quite interesting numbers like “Smithereens” or “Uridium,” the track “Simonson” emphasizes radiant pixels and glowing digital abstraction.
“Simonson” boasts a challenging sonic approach and this is a record that needs its time and your trust to unveil its solid ground. It could work perfectly in a movie, a theatrical production, or even in a visual arts installation because it has an architecture and a construction–musically speaking, it’s an aural freestyle arranged to guide the listener through its improvisational realms.
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