Twinkies just haven’t been the same since Hostess discontinued the white cardboard pallet that each sponge cake was tucked into beneath its cellophane comforter. Lift it from its bed and, without fail, it leaves a puddle of whipped shortening behind - scoop up the mess with an index finger and take it by the tongue.
Banzaei’s Neo-Audio is a plastic folding table topped with 22 Twinkie mats, arranged symmetrically in 2 rows and 11 columns. The cerebral remains of a squashed Zingers bar — taking the form of the record’s title track, a tangy conflict between a jazzy IDM imbroglio and its neighboring suburb of new-age keyboard sentimentality — leads the dollops of residual frosting in their morning yoga routine.
When I about 11 years old, I owned a PC game called The Political Machine 2008, a presidential election simulator that allowed one to take control of an avatar that resembled a squat bobblehead, entering it into a race to earn more electoral votes than its rival. Banzaei’s frenetic MIDI constructions are eerily reminiscent of the CD-ROM’s soundtrack: corporate, airy, brief, oddly pretty — the residual cream left by an industrialized cake.
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