The Creative Technology Consortium: Panoramic Coloursound (Dark Entries, 2023)

May 7, 2023 at 6:29 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

The Creative Technology Consortium: Panoramic Colorsound

The 300th release on Dark Entries is by a Chicago trio closely related to the supergroup Mutant Beat Dance, sharing 2 of its members (Melvin Oliphant aka Traxx and Jason Letkiewicz aka Steve Summers; Beau Wanzer is absent, Andrew Bisenius is present). Much like the Mutant Beat Dance albums, this is a gigantic sprawling beast that takes up multiple pieces of vinyl and runs through ideas pulling from multiple genres. The first track, “A Retro Vice”, has bouncing beats and Italo basslines, as well as police sirens in the background, the type that make you assume they’re actually coming from outside your window in the distance. There’s other tracks halfway between club jams and ’80s cop show soundtracks, but then there’s the Fripp-like guitars and slowly rolling landscape of “Beautifully Polluted Sunset”. “Complicity in the City” is like “Ghost Rider” sprinting sideways, and “Catastrophe” has buzzing electro-industrial vibes, but a lot of this is darker, prowling down the alley music. “High Altitude Meditation” is a trippy new age reflection that seems perfectly placed right around the middle of the album. “Nyte Sequence” has an upbeat rhythm that seems like it could launch into any number of ’80s synth pop hits, yet it just seems to race right past all of those shop fronts and follow its own intuition. “The Descent” is far from a typical, formulaic club cut, but it has an addictive synth sequence holding it in place along with electronic hand percussion beats, giving it a sense of propulsion and elevation without the need of a kick drum.

Leave a Comment »

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

The Answer Is In The Beat