Here’s some interesting, otherwordly synth action by the Netherlands’ Frank Dullaart, recently resurrected from the 80s with the help of Sanity Muffin. Not much is known about the guy or the recording other than the fact that not much is known, so I’ll spare the historical details this time and just go ahead and say that this is fucking weird synthesizer music from a bygone era that fans of weird synthesizer music will probably love instantly. Eno would be a really easy, lazy way to blanket this stuff, but if only to get you in the right ball-park, I’ll go ahead and drop that name, although at times it might make more sense to go with something like Kraftwerk. But Dullaart’s music dives further into outer-genre experimentation with his approach, playing in a playful way with tone, melody, and rhythm, combining disparate examples of each of these core musical elements in unwieldy sorts of ways to poke a hole in our perfect little listening world and squeeze all the air out of it like a balloon of normalcy being slowly deflated. It arrives like a science project concocted in some kind of a lab with bubbling potions and Tesla coils everywhere, and we get these twinkling, spooky ambient wonders full of dis-harmonies and mismatched rhythms and the buzzing undercurrent of electricity that might set off a bit of a brain imbalance as a result. Some tracks find the music rocking like a seesaw that’s on the deck of a ship at sea during inclement weather, others set up fairly steady electronic drum beats, only to riff on them with a sickly synth melody that’s in a completely (or slightly) different tempo or time-signature, and at one point in the tape we actually get a humanoid vocal creeping in for “Follow the Arrow” which is as completely bizarre as it is totally awesome. These odd, non-musical music-marvels, while fascinating and full of interesting textures and general crazy kinds of audio phenomena, are also not something I’d necessarily call “easy listening,” so fair warning if the bulk of this review wasn’t enough already. Anyway, you’ve had it plenty easy as it is, amirite?
More about: Frank Dullaart
