bitcrushed

It’s funny how cer­tain naming con­ven­tions become asso­ci­ated with cer­tain genres of music. When I first saw the name “Bit­crush” I mis­read it as “Bit­crusher”. It had been rec­om­mended to me by a friend who tends toward IDM/experimental/drone lis­tening, and given his his­tory of rec­om­men­da­tions I was expecting some­thing DnB-oriented–hard-edged and loud, glitchy and aggro. Per­haps that’s why I men­tally added the “er”. I asso­ci­ated it with Square­pusher, Enduser, and… really, now that I’m taking a look at the titles in my col­lec­tion, there aren’t that many “er” names. Ok, ok… the asso­ci­a­tion must have come from some­where else, then, right? Ok… how’s this? The “er” suffix implies action, or an active force in the music–a “Bit­crusher” is a being that destroys data to make new sounds; a “Bit­crush” is a pas­sive emo­tional force.

As you might have guessed, the music on Bitcrush’s new LP In Dis­tance (buy: mp3 or cd) gave me a bit of sur­prise. The drums here are largely live, recorded with lots of reverb and sonic space. They sound mas­sive, but mas­sive the way clouds off in the dis­tance appear as moun­tains. The tempo is relaxed, the gui­tars and synths that buoy the drums drift by in a per­petual near-waking state. Occa­sion­ally pro­grammed drums come in, usu­ally lay­ered along­side the live record­ings. Vocals by Mike Cadoo, the man behind the moniker, occa­sion­ally sur­face only to be quickly sucked under the waves. A couple songs in, I con­nected with the name; this is the sound of dis­tance, of forced dis­as­so­ci­a­tion from an object of desire.

“Colder” bril­liantly mar­ries this dis­con­nec­tion with a pal­pable sense of anger, as crushing drums and cavernous-sounding elec­tric gui­tars ambush a fairly straight­for­ward post-glitch tune near its end. Opener “Post” puts the live (or at least live-sounding) drums at the fore­front and really empha­sizes for the lis­tener what a bass-heavy album this will be. Cadoo’s words are near-unintelligible in classic shoegaze style, pro­moting mood over meaning, the abstract over the concrete.

There’s another (unre­leased) track, “As End Begins”, avail­able at his site. His label, n5md, has been con­sis­tently churning out great new releases. Another one to look out for is Loess’ Wind and Water, an even more blissed out piece of elec­tronic musical gauze.

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