Review: Elegant Humanoid - Ideoplastia

Ideoplastia is like an immensely chaotic laboratory experiment. Too many variables to keep track of, hazardous samples spilling out of protective glass tanks, a scientist singing deliriously as his brain fogs up with vibrantly coloured alien gases. Sound spews out of test tubes in sudden, violent reactions, and drones throb like status lights monitoring god-knows-what. Yet the resultant mess is beautiful in its excess. Ideoplastia is like a fireworks display where every rocket is ignited simultaneously, by accident – impulse exploding rebelliously out of the hand of choreography and control, abandoning the framework of drip-fed gratification to be everything, now.

The main source of this sensation is that gaseous spew that runs throughout the entire record; a mixture of burst pipe and fire alarm caking the stereo edges, framing everything within the sound of imminent disaster. The noise of the foreground sounds doubly as crooked against this backdrop. At times I hear the bleat of clarinet, curdled by phaser and squealing in panic. At others I hear old synthesisers gleaming in weird light patterns, or probing jaggedly for a transmission signal. And then, very occasionally, a beautiful melody manages to poke through the smoke – sidling calmly into the state of meltdown like the sudden, unexpected scent of lavender. Even as electric flames lick my ankles and super-charged wires flail like loose fire hoses, I fall under the woozy caress of those two alternating chords and forget where I am for a moment, trapped within that fleeting second of serenity that subsumes the body before it blacks out.