Pitchfork

As sample manipulation goes, Odd Nosdam's music feels partly like the tinkerings of a shut-in who lives in a windowless basement apartment filled with electronic junk and partly like, say, Boards of Canada. Much of the Anticon fixture's previous work has approached BoC's efforts to extract beauty from color-faded debris, but he doesn't work as hard to scrub off the mildew, and the instruments in "The Kill Tone Two" sound like they're struggling to push through a half-inch layer of nicotine stains, dust, and radio interference: a harp is rendered tinny and rust-coated as it passes through what sounds like a Game Boy's sound chip, a low buzz drones in the background like a broken refrigerator before manifesting itself as an occasional bassline, and the beats all sound coated in stiff cellophane. The Anticon site also says there's supposed to be a violin on this track somewhere, but it's hard to tell where it is, exactly-- in all likelihood, it's been warped beyond recognition into one of those dying machine sounds. It all sounds a bit like an AM dial that's only halfway tuned into an actual station, with all the attendant desolation that implies.

There's voices, too, though they're disorienting in a more predictable way: Why?'s Yoni Wolf flatly mutters poetryish pseudo-nonsense about staring in the mirror and experiencing some kind of philosophical malaise or another ("Good luck is a dead duck"?), and Tunde Adebimpe's voice fights through the static just enough to register as another, slightly more tuneful layer of noise. The vocals almost seem superfluous, especially since Odd Nosdam's music works best when it sounds like there's nobody else around to experience it.

[From Level Live Wires; due 08/28/07 on Anticon]