If you’ve seen Sculpture perform live you’ll be sure to agree they are one of few AV acts who have perfected a synaesthetic match between their audio and visual output.
Rueben Sutherland and Dan Hayhurst respectively use psychedelic zoetrope animations and on the fly audio manipulations to create an immersive experience as enjoyable as it is faintly absurd (and I politely use their own description when I say absurd).
“Membrane Pop”, released on Daniel Lopatin’s Software Recording Company label, finds them energetically discarding the idea that experimental music needs to explore the darker recesses of sound. The concept here is of willful experimentation without the oppression and playful humour without the chin stroking doom.
At times bizarre circuit bent cartoon bleep ‘Hackle Scam Populator‘, at others frenetic bespattered Keith Fullerton Whitman hyper modulations (5 Seconds in the Future is a You Made of Thought) – this is a sound that grabs you by the ears and pulls you into its freakish world.
‘Unhitch Your Program’ and ‘Polymorphic Operator‘ are similarly skittish yet short pieces flowing into each other, the latter throwing down a deadly speaker shuddering kick and bass combination in response to the fragmentary audio of the former.
‘Lingual Junk‘ splays spasmodically, is incredibly strange yet entirely compelling as percussion rattles in from every direction whilst knackered ghostly opera samples are pulled and stretched across it all.
Quite where they start when it comes to creating this stuff is impossible to tell – it often sounds like there is no work process at all yet instead they’ve loaded their machines with some of the strongest psilocybin known to man and left them for a few days to get on with it….
Make no mistake, this is weird, wonky and intricately oblique music – yet also enormous fun that will greatly appeal to fans of KFW, Brett Naucke and all things Radiophonic psychedelic.
“Membrane Pop” is available from May 12th on vinyl and digital. Digital comes with two bonus tracks (vinyl with download code).
Discover more about Sculpture and Software Recording Company on Inverted Audio.