loidis - "one day" review

much to be said about the mpeg artifacting here nd the way he so casually recontextualizes all strains of past present future dubbing. this album Dubs Contexts. pair it with early-2k rhythm & sound, or 70s dub, or anything from the 3xl/west mineral/shy-verse, or a sprinkles 12", or a deepchord/echospace wav, or shinichi atobe, or anything off perlon, or bleeding-edge soundcloud mp3s, its fidelity-architecture Always finds a way to complement the other track while distorting its sensory soundstage. One Day's lossy borders, upon closer listening, aren't actually lossy at all. the mp3warble in One Day is the sound of ambient digital information that has accumulated in the past 25 years, surrounding everyone's thoughts, actions, intentions, priorities, dreams, conversations...the information surrounding markets, record shops, home studios, community gathering zones, registered and abandoned www domains, discogs metadata, Seeping Into Reality, Changing Perception, it's the sound of phone-screen-afterthoughts lodging themselves into our mental checklists like phosphors get in the way of our vision. it's like, the sound of a thought that isn't ur own, looping in ur mind, recontextualizing the thoughts that are yours. or, externally, the sensation of others around u, people outside urself, a soundsystem outside of both of u, brain & body inside of u, the silent conversations that happen in air between things.

the now-familiar-to-us-after-decades borders of mp3 artifacting create engineering-scaffolding, our ears work to fill in the missing audio information, but there's no information actually missing. it's beautiful...this is a new sensation, this is just a small glimpse of DSP Music's future. (and by "new sensation" i mean it's probably like ~10 yrs old. mid2010s r rly when we started hearing post-everything digital-file-format-artifact-exploiting-music.. the new wave of footwork and its loyal archivists/subverters like SELA., the endless cycle of soundcloud rappers nd producers rapid-iterating upon/against each other, vaporwave......................etc... loidis is aware of this too....listen to his dj autobouncer620 nts mix where he points the spotlight at soundcloud rap.) when u blend Tequa with something like r&s' Carrier, the previously-invisible parameters of r&s' gorgeous analog mixdown suddenly become clear. u can hear the borders of "borderless" sound. One Day gestures toward the future of the club-sensory experience while challenging our understanding of the past. it affords the past a place inside of its framework of the future. the iterative conversation just keeps happening across time :)

the low-end engineering is my fav part lowk. the bass & kick r glued together, there's a slight mpeg smear to the low end, but the thumps, the hums, it's all deliberate, the low end sounds like when u are standing next to a stack in a club and u hear the grille rattling and air moving as the bass pumps out of it. this music is beyond lossless or lossy because it's engineered to scale infinitely in resolution the louder u play it. the point is that it works anywhere DESPITE preconceived notions re: audio engineering nd lossless audio quality. i hav many fond memories of hearing mp3s get totally chewed up by super high definition soundsystems at like 120+db. the sound is insane. u hear little ridges and dents inside of the reverb trails of sounds. the sonic "missing information" is mist floating around the dancefloor. mp3-dust-sparkle in One Day is an audio-representation of breathing in the fog machine mist. it sounds like when ur at Mansions and it's dark and warm and purple and orange everywhere. One Day uses mp3 artifacting to conjure a hyperreal image of the experience of hearing mp3 artifacting on a soundsystem. One Day is the sound of ur sensory system navigating the 2020s dancefloor, imo the 2020s dancefloor doesn't have much to do with being a physical dancefloor inside of a physical venue at all. 2020 started with us crafting our own Mind Venues. our own systems of experience/interaction/synthesis, where we facilitated conversations between our inner mental universes && the physical spaces our bodies occupied. Venues of Iteration, Operating Theaters.....idk. Observation Music. listen to something like Sit On My Interface 1/2. u know? it sounds like the fifth consecutive day of astral traveling in ur bed in winter 2020.

the west mineral catalog has been a guiding light for me, learning how to process this new reality, how to Exist as myself in a world that is 5 yrs old. it's Observation Music. One Day feels to me, like, it doesn't feel like a classic microhouse record at all. it feels like he is pointing to the whole Perlon continuum and so graciously merging it with the Internal, the Observation Music, the Ghost music, the internet-mind-music, pointing to, hey: you can think and feel at the same time...and leeds' careful Context Dubbing helps the past make more sense thru the lens of this present we are living through. One Day aligns itself with those moments of lucid reflection we all experience between information-fugues. it is the sound of the internal and the external meeting each other halfway. maybe it's the sound of somatic reintegration after the trauma of lockdown. idk. it certainly sounds like what dancefloors sound and feel like Now. it has nothing to do with dancefloors pre-2019. so, there's something there.

also, the artwork: we are standing right up against the speaker grille. gorg.

there is more i will write abt this record but idk i think the west mineral extended universe is charting an extremely crucial path toward the future of today's present, stuff that is firmly grounded in the dreaminess/dreariness/direness/delightfulness/desolation/decadence of minute-to-minute reality as of right now. quarter-century music. Present. it's not music for anything other than what already is...which can be whatever we want. :)