Beau Wanzer describes his collaborative process with the duo Corporate Park as follows. He drives over to their Denton, Texas place when on holiday from his job as a molecular biologist. He browses CP member Jonah Lange's VHS collection, and they have a couple tries at setting up their equipment. "Jonah has some beef Bourguignon cooking. We eat and crack open a cold one. Record for five to six hours. Sleep and repeat. We usually have a movie running the whole time, just to have something to point and laugh at."
Wanzer's music varies in polish—Civil Duty, his recent techno LP with Shawn O'Sullivan, might be his shiniest—but it all shares a spirit of red-eyed basement fiddling. As befits an artist with noise and industrial roots, Wanzer's music-making feels easy and diaristic, a means of puncturing domestic boredom. His talent is gleaning concise and slyly humorous music from this seemingly casual process.
This untitled collaborartive LP, Wanzer's first released with Corporate Park, apes his solo style. There's the dog-tired techno death marches, which make a 4/4 beat sound like the most onerous thing in the world ("Foreign Pedigree," "Worse Of The Hurse"), the acid zone-outs ("Immaculate Macula") and less placeable rhythm experiments (the killer "Helium Handicap" and "Whips, Chips, Chains, And Dips," which could almost fit in a Livity Sound set). Voices occasionally drift into the mix, weirdly strained and garbled with effects. It's easy to imagine one guy hunched over an SM58 while the others fiddle with a few battered pedals, one eye on the TV screen.
Each idea is clearly presented (even when, as with the ultra-compressed "Bored Hurt," the idea itself is grotty as hell), and thrown into stark relief by the tracks around it. If anything, the album suffers for its economy of presentation: longer, more-developed versions of these tracks might have found their way into many a DJ bag. But Wanzer has has never been particularly interested in the dance floor, as becomes clearer on ruminative tracks like "Sterility Factor" and "Squamata Valley." He's just passing an evening, and we're lucky enough to be able to listen in.
Wanzer's music varies in polish—Civil Duty, his recent techno LP with Shawn O'Sullivan, might be his shiniest—but it all shares a spirit of red-eyed basement fiddling. As befits an artist with noise and industrial roots, Wanzer's music-making feels easy and diaristic, a means of puncturing domestic boredom. His talent is gleaning concise and slyly humorous music from this seemingly casual process.
This untitled collaborartive LP, Wanzer's first released with Corporate Park, apes his solo style. There's the dog-tired techno death marches, which make a 4/4 beat sound like the most onerous thing in the world ("Foreign Pedigree," "Worse Of The Hurse"), the acid zone-outs ("Immaculate Macula") and less placeable rhythm experiments (the killer "Helium Handicap" and "Whips, Chips, Chains, And Dips," which could almost fit in a Livity Sound set). Voices occasionally drift into the mix, weirdly strained and garbled with effects. It's easy to imagine one guy hunched over an SM58 while the others fiddle with a few battered pedals, one eye on the TV screen.
Each idea is clearly presented (even when, as with the ultra-compressed "Bored Hurt," the idea itself is grotty as hell), and thrown into stark relief by the tracks around it. If anything, the album suffers for its economy of presentation: longer, more-developed versions of these tracks might have found their way into many a DJ bag. But Wanzer has has never been particularly interested in the dance floor, as becomes clearer on ruminative tracks like "Sterility Factor" and "Squamata Valley." He's just passing an evening, and we're lucky enough to be able to listen in.
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Published /
Wed / 10 Feb 2016 -
Words /
Angus Finlayson -
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Tracklist /
A1 Foreign Pedigree
A2 Mr. Measles
A3 Helium Handicap
A4 Bored Hurt
B1 Worse Of The Hurse
B2 Immaculate Macula
B3 Sterility Factor
B4 Whips, Chips, Chains, And Dips
B5 Squamata Alley
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