That Phinery batch though! After a bit of a break, the Danish label came back with a ten-pack, and holy moly, what a lineup. Kudos, friends, for filling a void we didn’t necessarily know we had. Ten’s a lot to talk about, but today I’m only talking ’bout one of ’em — that’s right, focus! (As I like to holler at the U8 soccer team I coach.) Raub Roy (which is not a Facebook pseudonym, and I’ve CONFIRMED this) is back with his umpteenth release (which should have tipped me off on the real-name thing to begin with), and if you’d be confused about me noting a single somebody on a, ahem, split cassette, I wouldn’t blame you, because ta-daa, and spoiler alert! Roy is BOTH Horaflora and Scy1e, so it’s not a traditional halves-y breakdown here. Instead, Roy hogs the whole tape, having obviously duplicated or cloned himself, or at least (and probably) delineated which recordings were going in which bucket by some kind of non-arbitrary method. For example, there is one bucket labeled “crawling around inside a piano” and another labeled “digital splatter.” Actually those are the only buckets, they’re not really examples.
Like a chameleon crawling along piano wire, Raub Roy’s Horaflora persona crawls around inside a piano like a chameleon, gingerly stalking insect prey and periodically losing its balance but hanging on as it flips upside down before righting itself again. Body Lag is thirty-five minutes of exploring this adventure, with the requisite (and welcome) electronics adding a bit of color for our lizard hero to stand next to and incorporate into its skin. Of course I’m imposing that visualization onto Body Lag — I guess you really won’t know what’s going to cross your mind until you immerse yourself in it and let its colors and textures pinprick your brain until you hallucinate like me.
If Horaflora spins me off into a very specific hallucination, then Scy1e is all over the place, the “digital splatter” bucket overflowing and making an absolute mess as I jump up and down with it in my hands, lid off, grinning and giggling like an idiot. Imagine if Autechre made music with no beats, all of it remaining instead in their heads, and just smeared the audio spectrum with audible paint categorized in seemingly random letter, number, and punctuation variations akin to their track titles. Scy1e, somehow speaking to me over the loudspeaker in this empty auditorium, assures me that my reaction is sufficient and that I’m going to be just fine once everything’s over. I am assured, and I wake up the next morning covered in paint that has somehow crystallized and grown while I was sleeping, a random palace of opaque geodes that shimmers in the first light of dawn.
So you see what happens when Raub Roy infiltrates your headphones? You lose sight of what’s real, embarking instead down strange imagination pathways that spiral off into weird spaces. Thank Phinery we’ve got the recorded proof.
