L:PO(X"") - qwerty OOPS!
(Shutter Hauteur via Crestfallen)
*****
Track listing:
Cancel (A Fraction)
Divisor
Frequency Density
Mensuration
Prism
Scalar
Significant Figures
Soroban
Vertex
Pioneers of the seminal Acid Reflux movement of the early 1990s, L:PO(X"") have been quiet for far too long. Silent, in fact, since issuing a communique dismissing their entire recorded output as "analogue filth" at the turn of the millennium.
Since that pronouncement, their classic hits, Expector8 and (Stuck In The) Spin Cycle, have been deleted and all clips of their sole, chaotic appearance on Top of the Pops -- in which they abandoned a live performance of Expector8 to present their (incorrect) solution to Fermat's Last Theorem -- have disappeared from YouTube.
In the interim, rumours have abounded of various abortive ventures -- an album of acoustic versions of Kraftwerk songs; The Turing Lyrics Project (classic rock anthems encrypted on a World War II Enigma machine); even a brief and unlikely stint masquerading as The George Deformbys (an ostensible covers band whose signature tune, When I'm Cleaning Windows XP, was usually guaranteed a hostile reception wherever it was played).
But now, finally, we have qwerty OOPS!
First, to parse the title. "Qwerty" appears to be a fairly straightforward reference to the structured randomness of a keyboard layout, while "OOPS!" not only introduces the element of error, a mistyping, but also conjures up incongruous echoes of breakfast DJ Dave Lee Travis.
The track listing, and the ostentatious rejection of all things analogue, would suggest a potentially arid exercise in so-called math-rock; L:PO(X"") plays with this expectation, however, not least on the "hidden" tenth track, The Enchanted War Hammer of Vlad-Estragon.
Even discounting the ironic prog of Enchanted War Hammer and its bid to recast Waiting For Godot as a D&D style role-playing game, qwerty OOPS! belies its rigidly arithmetical facade.
Of course, programmatic beats and Reichian repetition abound, as well as lyrical references to Euclidean geometry and calculus (Scalar contains an aside about a "slave to the algorithm", while Frequency Density is almost certainly the first song in history to feature the rhyming couplet "Simultaneous equation/Mash up the nation.")
But elsewhere there are unexpected touches of what can only be described as human warmth -- the "ah one, ah two, ah one, two, three, four" count-in to Mensuration's four-minute electronic drone, the brief kazoo solo at the end of Divisor, the sample from Bernard Cribbins' Right Said Fred ("Couldn't shift it, couldn't even lift it") that crops up repeatedly in Significant Figures.
All of which begs the question whether L:PO(X"") have retreated from their earlier, reductivist position, or whether another elaborate conceit is being played out.
Perhaps the only completed work from The Turing Lyrics Project holds the key:
Tknxkn kmistrs, bagsgsddd/Vbnyfnkkl nff!/Heerasdi (nhdfh kiibbg).