Orange Random A La Veneziano

I woke up at four in the morning. My iBook was propped on its side beside me, playing a truly scary piece of music. For a moment I was frozen. I seemed to recognize the sounds in the piece as fragments of sounds I'd been working with, coming from inside the computer; echoes of recent files replayed at random by some sort of ghost program, some digital poltergeist. It was bloody spooky, something between music and non-music. The result sounded like nothing I'd ever heard, so I decided to record it. That way, I'd have something to play the digital exorcist when I took my iBook to be purged of its demons. Well, soon the piece of music ended, and on came a friendly voice telling me it was 'Treetops' by Brooklyn experimentalists Black Dice. I realised that I was listening to Mixing It through RealPlayer (I'd fallen asleep listening to Night Waves, the nightly Radio 3 arts review programme, and Mixing It follows the Friday edition). Going on Rilke's maxim that 'beauty is just the first glimpse of terror we're still just able to bear', I've decided that Black Dice is where beauty is currently located.



Another place beauty is currently located is the new album from Shobo Shobo star Hypo, 'Random Veneziano'. The Fat Cat Records press release for the Black Dice album could apply to Hypo too: 'symmetry and chaos playing off against each other... as influenced or inspired by visual arts as they are music'. Random Veneziano is the fidgety, bizzaro-baroque artefact that Oskar Tennis Champion would have been if my old-fashioned songs (damn their coherent narratives!) hadn't got in the way; 'Random Veneziano' is lushly cheap pop chopped and changed, re-invented in a Dadaist dream, its architecture all Caligari-like. It's a plastic labyrinth, a random Venice in which pop Minotaurs can wander, lost, listening to New Order demos and My Bloody Valentine vocals, enjoying the Memphis furniture and the superflat 1980s-period Ashley Bickerton-style 'confusing yet commercial' surfaces.

I sing on one track on 'Random Veneziano', but the mp3 below isn't it: it's a demo Anthony Keyeux (who is Hypo) sent me when he was working on the album, which I then hacked about a bit and turned into a song for fun. Consider it as buyhypo'snewalbum-ware: if you like it, buy Hypo's new album.

Perfecto mp3 4.56 MB