ECOATM: s/t LP (Great Corner Sound, 2023)

February 4, 2024 at 6:48 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

Sometime last year, Fred Thomas played a last-minute set opening for Mdou Moctar at the Blind Pig. Instead of singing and playing guitar, he took the stage with just a SP-404 sampler and said he’d been working on a new project, and this was the first time he’d played any of this stuff in front of an audience. The music was fractured, noisy jungle with breakbeats that don’t always line up together, plus other stray synth riffs, guitar melodies, and scattered effects. All of this sort of stuff is totally in my zone, and I was instantly excited to hear more from this project. Now here’s an LP of that material. The harder tracks (“Deluge”, “Amateur Hour”) have a feverish energy comparable to the DHR label, but without the anarchist political bent. There’s also more slower, more bummed-out stuff like “Dawnless”, which is sort of like a bit from an indie surf demo run through a vaporwave spin cycle. “As You Said” is the longest piece, and it’s more of a shimmering dub techno track, but not all of the echos and delays are in sync, so the beats overlap and bump into each other. “Motor Lodge” starts out as a blur of frayed distortion, but gradually reveals a sweet, lonesome guitar melody tucked away inside. “Plateau” is a fun, hyperactive sliver of hypnagogic pop splattered against funhouse mirrors (and with unexpectedly huge bass drops). “Unsearchable Image” is the album’s most subtle and delicate song, a mirage of murmuring rhythms and a prismatic synth sequence. Fred’s made other synth records and started other electronic projects, but this approaches electronic composition from an entirely different angle, and it’s amazing to hear how far he pushes things from such a limited setup.

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