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LP
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ELP 029LP
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Novo Line reprises the meter-messing genius of his Movements album (ELP 024LP, 2016) with the Dyad mini-LP. Exclusively using the tools of '88/'89 professional recording set-ups, namely the Atari ST, but with a slight algorithmic alteration. While it's increasingly hard to find new tricks in old gear, especially with the resurgence of hardware fetishism and the ubiquity of DAWs, that's exactly what Nat Fowler has been doing for the best part of a decade as Novo Line. By, in his own words, "misusing one algorithmic composition program (not, by a longshot, a professional music production tool of any epoch) contained in 208kb of data on a 3.5" floppy disk," he generates and explores new permutations of old music which, ironically enough, sounds more innovative than a lot of new music in circulation. Inputting ever-changing parameters of melody, and 29-year old algorithms, the machine's voice is live-mixed and presented un-rendered as maxed-out waveforms via 1MB RAM, resulting in a severely compressed and combusting effect that leave mastering and sound engineers the world over scratching their heads in puzzlement. However, the effect is equally enthralling to anyone whose ears have become overly accustomed to contemporary emulations of "space" in electronic music, and genuinely sound unique in relief of the contemporary field. The release poses a playful question: can a record be ambivalent as to which speed it should be played? Celebrating vinyl and futhermore physical media, the listener is encouraged to find their exact speed of preference with the RPM toggle and pitch slider, that nearly forgotten joy in modifying speed in real time without a CPU mediating between the listener and sound; some tracks stumble heavily at 33rpm like boulders in the tumble dry, while others flash by at 45. In the taut, recoiling thud of "Monad", through the frenetic pop edit of "Ennead" to the 'floor-curdling prong of "Dyad Marcia" on the front, to the forceful new beat mutation "Tetrad", and the mind-bending "Melpomenean Dyad" which closes the LP, the album's heavily challenging, but deeply satisfying gear seriously, yet playfully, messes with convention. Essentially, Novo Line is reveling in the pure spirit of computer music and the sonification of dance music as we know it -- born in the '88/'89 phenomenon of techno-house music, including its industrial/EBM precedents, and its new beat/euro house offshoots. RIYL: Aphex Twin, V/Vm, Not Waving, Powell. Cut at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin.
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LP
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ELP 024LP
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Following a limited tape release for Ecstatic, Berlin's Nat Fowler renders his meticulous Novo Line alias for its second full-length release, a killer marriage of automated EBM and unexpected MIDI disruptions, continuing a life-long quest for esoteric knowledge and a love of archaic computer hardware. Modeled on re-appropriated software, run on two separate Atari ST's, Movements is the compelling result of obtuse production technique and painstaking trial and error; basically experimentation at the service of discovering a sound that really sounds unlike anything else out there. As he explains: "I like the idea of using restrictions in order to find and push boundaries, from limiting which octaves I use to how many notes at a time. I use the only PC capable of MIDI that had no multitasking, so communication is immediate, a direct mechanical communication from my fingers to the sounds is created. I feel lucky because technology has accelerated so fast since the first digital synthesizers and PCs that nothing since the early 1980s has been really pushed to its limits." In that sense, he can be placed in a small category of operators - including The Automatics Group, Dave Noyze, Lorenzo Senni and V/VM among them - who persistently gnaw at the boundary between dance-pop and avant-electronics, and with all of whom he shares a capacity for hearing the poetry of singular frequencies, unique pitch combinations and the strange electronic timbres just waiting to be born from overlooked, outmoded equipment. Whilst at times it may recall the saltiest digital tone and gait of early Chicago house and Belgian new-beat, there's a futuristic funk and idiosyncratic ambiguity to Movements that entirely belongs to Novo Line; whether bubbling up the mutant dembow lacquer of opener, "The Movement 1", radiating form the tightly-bound, curdled funk of "Hot Piece", or jabbing like a bag of cyborg slow house cats in "The Movement 2", it really does make for one of the year's finest and most addictive dancefloor mutations, bar none. 2016's most meticulous album of algorithmic body music. Inspired by F.M. Alexander, G.I. Gurdjieff and Pythagoras. Mastered and cut by Matt Colton at Alchemy.
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