Toiret Status Nyoi Plunger

[Noumenal Loom; 2017]

Rating: 4.5/5

Styles: hyper!
Others: Sonic the Hedgehog, Crash Bandicoot, Spyro

Follow the veins for buried treasures! A biology of musicianship approaching the behavior of bacteria; white blood cells that, when whispered awake, fight off infections like seagulls woven into sea-waves, dipping and dipping and dipping and morphing and morphing and morphing until a door opens in this free world, this costume party. A delta of welcomeness, hypertexts mapped as MP3s, claymation MechWarriors, pianos and hedgehogs and mallets and chihuahuas and an airborne noise tinkling in the nighttime of your organs. Plunge!

Plunge, plunge, plunge! Bedtime is for fake stars, and this pad goes on for like 10 seconds and then a boing-y sound comes in and it makes me giggle (hehe) and after that it swivels and, whoa, I’m back to my typical state-of-mind of introspection and lingering. Here be raw uncensored emotions in our Collective Toilet, plunged and collapsing in neon shades of MIDI, scattering our secrets all about. On the other side of this waste, there are drum sequences as if composed by spasms, floating in a body-less song-n-dance that symbolizes the toy store, with rainbow after rainbow after rainbow after paint streak after paint streak after paint streak.

Where to now? To swirling mists, to the clustered, decentralized streets of Tokyo, to an arcade, a forest, a childhood with Ren & Stimpy on mute, a chaos that you can control or a chaos that you willfully choose to be a part of as opposed to one where existential stress is the M.O. All you can do is laugh: laugh at the timbres and laugh at the 3D hyper-referentiality, the centripetal melodies and centrifugal rhythm (unattached, let loose, not confined, undefined) built up as if made of Legos or Play-Doh or pillows constructed into a pillow fort: a totally rad pillow fort.

It skates, poses, animates, drips in color, and dances in moonlight with a sense of the slapstick on fleek. Lo, it suggests spas, swamps, iPads, kiddo orchestras, blimp of sun rays, fake operas, cribs. Hypothetically, it’s a complex playground that you find yourself approaching when on acid, your limbs moving to irregular percussive structures in tandem with a feeling that the whole world might as well be a jungle gym, because we are alive and can face our sorrows with our music by giving them a big “suck it!” sign with dignity and a sense of I’m so cool I’m uncool.

With all that albeit strangely. A baby kicks the piano notes and music plays. Neuron stars, a veil of perfume, Fisher-Price, movable toys, movable sound, texts and emails forlorn and estranged. Utterly and excessively in this album’s grasp, grabbed, all the goo in flight & a sound that leans in, breathes out, opens your ears as you listen to the foliage of its timbre, its enamel MIDI, its junk MIDI, its lingual MIDI, its cheeseball MIDI, its baby-food MIDI, and its general theory that this music makes us embrace the madness of our 2 lives: the IRL, the online. & also the comic book, the action figure, the soft-synth preset, the time when we were between the ages of 0-3, the satirical side of the club.

Metaphors without referents, weird conjunctions, a veneer of irony tinged with poignancy. Blob after blob after blob, then splash! The plunge!

Eureka!

Some releases are so incredible we just can’t help but exclaim EUREKA! While many of our picks here defy categorization and explore the constructed boundaries between ‘music’ and ‘noise,’ others complement, continue, or rupture traditions that provide new forms and ways of listening. Not all of our favorites will be listed here, but we think each EUREKA! album is worthy of careful consideration. This section is a work-in-progress, so expect its definition to be in perpetual flux.

Most Read



Etc.