Pitchfork

It's a curious thing when electronic artists raised in 12-inch DJ culture opt for long-form composition. You can imagine, say, the force driving Goldie to create "Mother" had something to do with him wanting to be taken seriously as an artist and seeing how far the genre he was working with could be stretched. The same thoughts were surely running through Pete Townshend's head in the second half of the 60s. These impulses have led to some interesting music and boundaries being pushed a few feet; they've also led to large swaths of wasted time.

While Plaid's newest record Greedy Baby, a CD/DVD "AV Album" created in collaboration with video artist Bob Jaroc, isn't properly a single composition (there are gaps of silence between the nine tracks), it certainly feels like a long-form piece. It's partly how the music is presented and partly the uniform sound palette, but it has even more to do with tracks that don't want to stand on their own. All seem to exist in relation to one another, and nothing pops its head out to say, "I'm a single, listen to me first." This being the case, you have to judge Greedy Baby by how taking in its 51 minutes in a single sitting feels.

There's a marked prog vibe early on, evident on the second track "I Citizen the Loathesome". Twinkling synths that sound like a digital approximation of a harpsichord introduce a theme, which gradually builds in tempo until a faux-pipe organ and an actual chorus of wordless voices join in. The scales, chords, and tempo changes suggest widescreen pomp at every turn, building to a distorted guitar-like sound and the massed choir intoning apocalypse. Unfortunately, the grandiosity leads nowhere in particular, and when the music box intro of "The Launching of Big Face" comes next, we're back to the same low-level, vaguely anxious mood. That vibe continues with minor variations on "ZN Zero", which manages at least a neat Escheresqe trick whereby it seems to be constantly ascending.

"The Return of Super Barrio" is where the record finally takes off, as humor and playfulness seep in. Steel drums, a loping acoustic bass integrated with programmed beats, and a reasonably catchy tune combine to suggest a mariachi band performing on one of Jupiter's moons. From there we go to "E.M.R", which stretches on for 10 minutes but feels considerably longer, with its indistinct bells and electronic percussion echoing endlessly into space. It's here that you begin to suspect that that the music isn't necessarily meant to stand on its own, and that the video is an essential part of the work.

The visuals, then. "War Dialer" opens the DVD on a high note. The audio is a collage culled from a hacking program dialing random numbers in search of a vulnerable modem. As women answer and speak in puzzlement to the dialing machine, a circular array of graphics moves in time with the voices. There's nothing to it, really, but the piece is clever in its simplicity; same goes for the animated line drawing that accompanies "The Launching of Big Face", which dances and contorts itself into some beautiful shapes and makes the uninspired Philip Glassisms of the track seem worthwhile.

A couple uninspiring videos are little more than edited assemblages of cities at night, hoping to evoke a sense of dread in slow pans and quick montages among graffiti-covered alleys and traffic streaming beneath lit buildings. To sit through the entirely of "E.M.R.", a mostly dark screen with layers of dim light floating around, is to wish desperately for a temporary infusion of a heavily disorienting drug that might make it interesting.

So we're stuck with a few nice moments in a work that resists being pulled apart. The dull patches are particularly depressing when you realize how much work went into them for so little payoff. That's the risk with these big, long-form statements, with so much invested by both the artists and the audience. When you're sitting through them and they don't quite work, you become aware of how painfully short life really is.