Review: Spyros Polychronopoulos - Electronic Music

What happens when the object I perceive becomes indistinguishable from the medium with which I perceive it? I begin to doubt myself. I begin to doubt Electronic Music. The record snubs the measures I have developed to assess the size, origin and proximity of sound objects in the corporeal universe, and my brain is scrambled by all attempts to place it; electronic texture as time-space hack, fucking up my assessment of present tense and perceptual authenticity. Where or when is Electronic Music? Is it an object I can reach out and touch, or is it an alien hologram? A picture of a picture of a picture?

Polychronopoulos talks about his use of reverb. Given that the sounds are devoid of “real world” reference points, I cannot know whether the reverb is a spatial response or a limb of the sound itself. When listening to Electronic Music over speakers, chattering high frequencies splash delicately against my wood flooring, while the illusionary resonances of beaten oil drums shoot into the air in front of me. Or do they? The album moves too fast for me to adjust – sharp focus, soft focus, gigantic landscape, microscope slide, deafeningly loud, barely present – and my only option is to allow Electronic Music to exist as numerous quantum possibilities. It is the gargantuan echo of an aircraft hangar, the intimate and disturbing sensation of an alien tongue licking my cochlea, a shard of glass in audio form. As soon as it enters the earthly atmosphere it perishes. Electronic Music cannot survive here.