Restless new music chameleon Kyle Bruckmann (best known as an improvising oboist mining the intersection of free jazz, noise rock and contemporary classical) offers his first fully electronic solo release.
Sourced primarily from vintage analog synthesis, this double-album diptych anachronistically evokes, from a sardonic post-techno vantage point, both late 60s and late 70s experimentation. Attempted minimalisms chafe at their own restraints, bursting at the seams to comprise “a suite of weighted blankets for an intracranial dancefloor.” By turns hypnotic, immersive and bludgeoning, "Mesmerics/Hindsight" charts an unlikely Venn diagram linking the Day-Glo legacy of the San Francisco Tape Music Center with proto-Industrial’s bleak, gray throb.
While the influences of those two seminal electronic music eras map roughly onto the two albums respectively, echoes of each reverberate throughout. "Mesmerics/Hindsight A," on balance, prioritizes space; "Mesmerics/Hindsight B," periodicity. The limited-edition 90-minute cassette contains both albums; purchases of the physical edition include digital downloads of both.
Throughout the quarantined conditions of 2020-21, Bruckmann sought a stop-gap for his preferred creative modes of highly collaborative, real-time interactivity by indulging in a hermetic practice of solo electronic explorations. Between his home studio and the electronic music labs of two colleges where he teaches, he exploited access to an instrumentation featuring classic Buchla, Moog and E-mu gear alongside more contemporary Eurorack modules.
"The physically and psychosocially distanced circumstances of 2020-21 have found me driven further into my own head and deeper into solo work and circuitry. Offered here are selected research findings from that at times harrowing journey: a suite of weighted blankets for an intracranial dancefloor.
A parallel dimension of hindsight: as I hurtle through middle age and devote an ever larger portion of my career to teaching, I’m confronted with the inevitability of my aesthetics growing ever more ossified, anachronistic, irrelevant. To my students and younger colleagues, I suspect I have become the equivalent (vis-à-vis Ohio in the mid-70s, the Lower East Side in the early 80s, Chicago in the late 90s, etc. etc.) of the boomer who won’t shut up about Woodstock.
One possible response? Double down, as they say; make that central to the creative exercise. This is, in part, an interleaved love letter to two volatile junctures (both especially salient in the history of the synthesizer) on which I’ve remained perennially fixated: the heady intersection of 'art music' experimentalism with 'popular' psychedelia as the 60s skidded through the Altamont Pass into the 70s, and the gag reflex of post-punk and industrial as the 70s gave way to the Anglo-American neocon hellscape of the 80s.
I particularly acknowledge indebtedness to a West Coast electronic music legacy with roots in the San Francisco Tape Music Center, but that also encompasses the likes of the League of Automatic Music Composers, the Residents, Screamers, and the ongoing Brutal Sound FX empire. (Rest in power, Mills College CCM.)"
1. Blindside 03:32
2. Used To Dance 04:12
3. Mind Blight 03:53
4. Mesmeric (sedimentary) 05:38
5. Large Gatherings 03:57
6. Mesmerics (metaphoric) 04:29
7. Use for Dance 03:18
8. Fight | Flight 02:55
9. Mesmeric (igneous) 05:07
10. Keinzeit 04:31
Kyle Bruckmann, electronics
Mastered by Myles Boisen, Headless Buddha Mastering Labs, Oakland, June 2021
Cover image & Layouts: Dustin Krcatovich / Golden Feelings
