Hello, I’m back with another review. This one is a recent release on THE NEW U.S. GOVERNMENT of the album “Extractions” by Time Consumer. This album was released on Limited Edition Cassette and Digital Album. The version I’m reviewing is the review copy which contains 16-bit/44.1kHz CD quality masters of all the 12 tracks, the album artwork I grabbed from the Bandcamp release page, as illustration of this review.
“Extractions” is a full length album by Time Consumer, in his more sound collage focussed style and packs 1 hour 10 minutes of music on 12 track spread over the two sides of the Limited Edition Cassette. Quite a much longer than the split I reviewed yesterday, the album goes into a more hypnotizing minimal pure sonic texture based direction. However it’s definitely a strange but also captivating and fun listen of an album. First track Times Two (on side A) is very minimal, a “knocking” mechanic kick sound is combined with vinyl crackling and other subtle ticks. It’s a piece that is focused on the subtle changes in the rhythm and it’s nice to also focus on the little resonances of the sounds being used, nice one. Thought Emotion is a piece produced with a nicely old-school lo-fi sound, it’s full of muffled saturated bass kick noises, low Industrial bangs and delayed ticking wooden spatula like sounds, backed by a distant hiss. It’s like the more organized rhythm of some site with Industrial machinery, nice murky lo-fi sound again. Gunz revolves all around a looped music sample that gets filtered and distorted over the time of this track. Additional to this music sample there’s also again a kind of mechanical sound loop that makes the music sample sound more like machinery. The shifting of effects and the rhythm give the piece a hypnotizing vibe and its gets nicely dirty with distortion near the end with filter resonance hissing along nicely. On Drying we have an even murky dark ambience in the track, with muffled strange low warbled noises and hiss being accompanied by a metal sounding fast 32nd note rhythm that’s being filtered in sweeps. Rather nice murky Industrial ambience, good track. On Key Command we have a beat rhythm that sounds more like a straight-forward beat with a kicklike sound and percussive field recording samples sounding like hihat and rim shot. There’s also this machine beep that sounds like a cuckoo, pretty funny sound and some mechanic sound mixed in the rhythm together with some voice scraps in there. It’s particularly nice how the rhythmic layers shift around in this piece and the kick sometimes gets a louder (more distorted) and then softer again, nice grooves. Joejoe starts off with a filtered slow bassy beat but after some silence moves to the main part of the track. Joejoe is literally made up of samples of a voice saying Joe repeated in a rhythm and filtered through an FFT / vocoder like filter which makes the samples sound a bit metallic like, metal piece irregularly shaking in a box. The sample rhythm gets low pass filtered in slow sweeps and near the end gets accompanied by a mysterious low filtered rumble in the background. It’s a fun minimal piece with plenty of nice details to spot in the seperate parts of the sample and the shifting rhythms. On Closed Space (on the B-side) we have a much more distorted piece made of wooden sounding percussive banging, heavily distorted bassy noise and bass kick hits and an Industrial resonating fuzzy distorted drone. Besides these sounds there also seem to be some bird sounds in the mix, it’s a nice screechy piece sounding like a dark version of working at a lumber workshop, work is tense and stressful and endless. Nice dirty vibes. On Timebell Time Consumer kicks off the piece with delayed and saturated cuckoo clocks sound and then moves towards the sounds of an old door bell delayed and saturated, then a heavily distorted door bell sound loop fades in and mixes in. The harmonics of the bell heavily manipulated, the loop sounds a bit like a hellish version of a doorbell, scary! The delays of the cleaner doorbell also get manipulated in delay time to create some nice quirky effects. A cool sonic meditation on the doorbell sound. Cappucino then, features the nastiest way a coffee machine can sound, it’s hilariously weird in its concept, but I love it. The piece is fully based on what sounds like all kinds of device sounds from a coffee machine and nearby devices being chopped up or put in a rhythm or played with effect manipulation, including the hum and buzz of the coffee machine being put through an intense chorus effect. The sucking sound of the cappucino milk is particularly nasty. Pretty hilarious and intense piece that almost turns making a cappucino into a Noise track at points. New Recording features a stuttery mechanical motor like sound, some occasional sound breaking bangs and metal ticking sounds. Like the soundtrack off a car repair workshop, recording in a lo-fi manner. Simple in structure but enjoyable definitely. Floating Orb is the piece on this album that gets pretty melodic actually. In this case it’s mostly the bassline creating the melody, this bass sound also moves a bit through the stereo field, pretty trippy sound, it’s accompanied by what sounds like chopped up AM radio music that matches the bass in a way, but also creates an interesting juxtaposition between the two elements. There’s quite a sweet melodic development in this track, nice. In the last track Timepass, we have vinyl crackling sounds (this time phase manipulated), similar to first track Times Two, now however, the sound is accompanied by subtle mid frequency resonating sound and some occasional metalic saturated bangs. The quiet ambience of a workshop once again, nice.
“Extractions” by Time Consumer is a pretty varied and interesting lo-fi experimental sound collage album that is minimal in its structures but features quite some enjoyable sonic textural situations that recall the nice 80’s old-school Industrial experimental tape releases. While this is more of an album to listen to focused, the lo-fi aesthetic and catchy rhythms give this album its own weird and enjoyable kind of aesthetic that definitely makes this a particularly different kind of listening experience. Great album.
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