Rashad Becker is a fairly revered and influential figure in experimental music circles due to his role as the resident mastering genius at Basic Channel's Dubplates studio.  That association is a bit deceptive here, as anyone expecting anything resembling dance music will be spectacularly wrong-footed by his debut release. Becker has taken abstract experimentalism into some very exotic, disorienting, and gloriously wrong territory.  I do not think I will hear a stronger or more unique noise (or utterly uncategorizable) release this year.
The most immediately striking aspect of Traditional Music is that I have absolutely no idea how Becker got the completely unhinged sounds that populate these eight pieces.  While there are a number of textures that seem like they potentially could have emerged from an abused and overprocessed modular synth, my best guess is that the album is almost entirely based on samples of field recordings that have been manipulated into unrecognizable oblivion.
While nominally divided into two suites, "Dances" and "Themes," the overall feel is of being inside a menacing, unhealthy, and lysergically warped rainforest that sometimes seems to be in the midst of a catastrophic earthquake or volcano.  That is to say: there is not a lot that could be construed as "music" per se (even by a purely notional species).  Rather, Becker crafts a sonic menagerie of impossibly vibrant, creepily metallic-sounding, and violently pitch-shifting animal and insect noises.  In fact, the rare non-animal noises that appear only serve to make Traditional Music even uglier, more visceral, and more disturbing, such as the clattering metal and horrible retching noises that embellish the crescendo of "Themes IV."
While willfully deranged, brutally processed abstract music is certainly nothing new, Becker's execution of it is quite peerless.  All of Rashad's disturbing sounds are delivered with pristine clarity and twine together to form an organically squirming and slithering tapestry of blurting and buzzing horror.  Everything seems completely deliberate and each horrible sound is allowed all the space it needs to make its full unpleasant impact.  Also, Becker never breaks his illusion with anything resembling a wrong or thematically inconsistent move, nor does he resort to using dense layering or "noise" to lend power to his mangled wildlife sounds.  Instead, all of Traditional Music's formidable menace is earned the hard way: though the meticulously interwoven interactions of just a few textures mastered for maximum presence.
It could easily be argued that this is a weirdly perfect album, as any of Traditional Music's apparent faults are entirely dependent on the perspective of the listener.  For example, anyone expecting anything resembling Basic Channel will probably find this absolutely unlistenable.  Also, even those amenable to challenging and dissonant experimental music may not like that these eight pieces all sound very similar to one another or that they do not follow any kind of dynamically satisfying compositional trajectory.  However, to critique this album for any of those reason is take issue with what Tradition Music is not, rather than what it is...and what it is is brilliant, visionary sound art.  There are few moments scattered among these eight pieces where the "music" resembles anything created by a human: it actually feels far more probable that these are actual field recordings from hell, someone's nightmares, or a very distant and  horrible planet than the product of some German guy's studio (even though I know better).  It might not be pleasant, but Becker has unquestionably crafted something truly otherworldly with no clear precedent that I am aware of.  That is a damn fine achievement indeed.
 
Read More
