Whilst it’s obvious that a guitar will always broadly sound like a guitar, music at the more experimental end of electronics gets interesting when your ears are presented with genuinely new sounds. Whilst it’s something we often hope any new recording may reveal, it’s not something that happens often.
Thankfully for us, Finnish artist Joonas Siren who records as Forces, created this new album Chimæras from an unusual collection of hardware and software. Whilst these new sounds clearly come from more than just using odd sound generators, this release is littered with spiky new sonic weirdness.
Chimæras are mythological creatures, and each track here is named after some oddly formed mishmash of real and illusionary forms, remixed in the imagination, whispers and legends. The music similarly follows these disparate elements overlapped and interwoven into new forms.
Pegasus could be a euphoric dance anthem but here it’s sliced into a tumbling mess of pixels and laser beams. Leidos is the throb of electricity before escaping into a sonic pinball machine, whilst Rheinmetall continually derails itself from clean electronics into noisy chaos. Manticore travels from a nightclub warp out into an oceanic paradise. Lilith is all dreamy ambient surges before corroding into a glitchy, hall of mirrors mayhem. Oshkosh unravels from shards of electronic vocalisations into glimpses of a robotic opera…
In fact, the 10 tracks gathered here, none of which stray far beyond 4 minutes, all feel like familiar forms that develop in unexpected ways. Somehow the overall theme of the album fits perfectly. In the benign fabric of music, these unusual sounds do all give a sense of new or seldom witnessed variations.
The whole conceptual framing of the album seems somehow perfect given the fact that cybernetic and AI both loom large in music these days, literally giving life to technology. Whilst this album isn’t really about these advances, it’s both challenging and innocent to think about new sounds in this way.
Odd concoctions, weird potions, and oil mixed with water, to conjure and animate creative new beasts.
Chimæras is out now, released by mappa, and is available on cassette and digitally
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