It takes less than 10 seconds to get a sense of the world drawn in Autodetuned’s new album Lasitud. A grumbling metallic roar, a cacophony of bells ground into a thick paste, pecked at by glitching foreground vectors. It’s the sound of some huge glowing smelter, a flythrough over a vast industrial hellscape, on a grimy rain lashed planet.
Lasitud is the latest in a series of hugely adventurous releases like Ruido Concreto, The Divide and Microwaves that we’ve tuned into over the last few years by Madrid based artist Juan Cepas, under the name Autodetuned. Cepas is also part of the equally wild and fascinating duo 500 Goats, with José Ma Pérez-Flor.
“Lasitud is composed of 6 free improvisations with minimal overdubs, it features guitars, pedals, contact microphones, and other sound objects. These tracks are presented in the order they were recorded, with no retakes.”
Lasitud 2 could be late phase John Fahey in deep space whilst Lasitud 3 is rhythmic shards and reflections, all haphazardly stacked on top of each other. A weird form of beauty at the absolute edge of noise. Sound here is reduced to sculptural material, actual space filled, kneaded and folded like dough, rubbed and scoured like metal and stone, and shattered like glass.
The initial space around Lasitud 4 offers a brief calm before spinning like a potter’s wheel as foghorns roar and super tankers collide on the horizon. Out the fuzzing mayhem, morse codes rise into huge buzzing arcs of fizzing energy.
The longest track Lasitud 5, at almost 6 minutes is somehow the most static piece on the album. A creaking plateau of Lynchian steaming vents and ominous clanking plumbing.
In many ways, the final track is the destination, an attempt to derail this maniac march. Here, the whole set up is corroded and damaged. An aural game of Whac-A-Mole where sounds slink unexpected sideways. Everything here causes a series of reactions, before finally, an accumulation of silt, builds into a peak of nothing…
You can imagine how this music was made, and the specifics behind each sound are so far removed from what landed on the tape. The input doesn’t equal the output. How simple sonic generators, markers in time, that can become instantly something else, an ongoing leap for the imagination. All conjured from a presumably small and simple setup, but birthing a whole vast galaxy of sound.
We heard the shadows of Milan Knizak, C Shultz & Hajsch, JH, and even Roland Kayn, in this miniature gem of an album. Similarly, Lasitud is undoubtedly abstract music, and it may sound abrasive but very quickly pulls you inside – somewhere engrossing.
There is somehow a superficial gloom here, and chaotic rubble, but careful listening quickly reveals it’s just a brief acclimatisation to Autodetuned’s uniquely disorientating and deeply hallucinatory world.
Stunning and immersive stuff.
Lasitud is out now – available as a digital download here
obladada.com 