Sculpture - Membrane Pop

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  • Sculpture are an audio-visual outfit comprising one musician, Dan Hayhurst, and an animator, Reuben Sutherland. This makes listening to Membrane Pop on headphones something like watching a 3D movie without the glasses on. But even without Sutherland's visual input, Membrane Pop has an immersive feel. Sculpture's music is fantastical and absurd, like being plonked down on the set of a particularly wonky Jeunet film. It's gooey and dense, overflowing with seemingly random sequences of musical code, dislocated samples and woolly drums. "Materialising" ushers us into Sculpture's world, as colorful bubbles of sound gabble like crazed chipmunks. From there, the gentle digital ripples of "Multi-Faith Capsule" evoke some vague feeling of nostalgia. There's no discernable rhythm to "Symbolic Molecule"—I can't tell if it was randomly generated or is the result of hours of intricate tinkering—while "Unhitch Your Program" dribbles out more arbitrary bleeps and blobs. "Polymorphic Operator" lends the album some bite, its breakbeat drums rattling like an open window on a windy night. "5 Seconds In The Future Is A You Made Of Pure Thought" opens with a rare human touch—a sampled female voice—though it's been heavily tampered with, while "Distraction Display" squeaks out an orchestral ode to primitive computer game soundtracks. "Hackle Scam Populator" is probably the album's most hooky tune, trying its best to adhere to a normal rhythm. "Lingual Junk" hoovers up vocal samples from the ether, then fuses them to a beat that reaches Squarepusher levels of impenetrability. Hayhurst said he wanted to "make a coherent, adventurous electronic pop record." At first I wasn’t sure how seriously to take this comment. How could you hear Membrane Pop as anything other than a resolutely abstract album, too strange for all but the most adventurous ears? Then I listened to the digital bonus track, "Instability." This one starts out as an unlistenable shambles and gets weirder from there. It feels like Sculpture's way of resetting the listener's sonic compass—its presence makes the preceding tracks seem far less abstract. So I listened to Membrane Pop again, with fresh ears. And I had to hand it to Hayhurst: this time it did sound something like a coherent, adventurous electronic pop.
  • Tracklist
      01. Materialising 02. Multi-Faith Capsule 03. Symbolic Molecule 04. Unhitch Your Program 05. Polymorphic Operator 06. 5 Seconds In The Future Is A You Made Of Pure Thought 07. Hackle Scam Populator 08. Distraction Display 09. Lingual Junk
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