Christopher King, the artist behind Symbol, has been prolific for a number of years, as the founding member and guitarist for This Will Destroy You, creating film scores, and spending time in other local Austin bands. Online Architecture, however, is his first truly solo release. Across six compositions juxtaposing lush electronics with decaying analog media, the album has a familiar warmth while never shaking the feeling of something sinister just beneath the surface.
King intentionally dubbed his recordings from modular synthesizers and effects onto decaying 1/4" and 1/2" inch magnetic tape, utilizing the fragmenting sound as an instrument unto itself, a natural form of post-production that no software plug-in could fully approximate.Inevitably there are some parallels to be drawn to William Basinski's Disintegration Loops, but the two are completely distinct and separate entities that happen to use a similar technique.
The opening piece, "Tracer," is probably the lightest one.What sounds like it could almost be guitar is mixed with keyboards and covered in a sun-baked, crumbling layer of reverb.Both due to its instrumentation and its decrepit source material, it feels like revisiting a collection faded memories from the late 1970s.Beyond that things start to get a bit more unsettling.
"Shadow Harvesting" sits amid a lo-fi ambience, crackling tape and mechanical sounds covering an organ-like repeating synth pattern.Compared to "Tracer," it is a bit more skeletal, and because of this it brings a sort of insinuated creepiness that reappears throughout the album."New China" comes together similarly, with sad synth tones forming the foundation with almost rhythmic loops defining the rest of the piece.
Things do slip more into dissonance once "Syn Cron" hits its stride: a noisy, almost guitar like sound leads the way, with other, more gentle layers lightly drifting from channel to channel.The more ragged sounds hide low in the mix on "Clear Passage," beneath shimmering, string-like tones and soft electronic passages.The long closing piece, "Lineage," initially has a more malignant feel through some sinister synth pulses at its introduction, but later drifts into a sad, yet hazy and hallucinogenic outro.
King’s first release as Symbol is hard to consider a debut given his involvement in many other bands and projects, and the influence of those projects resonate in Online Architecture.Complex, moody, and fascinating, it is the use of analog decay and damage that give this album its distinct identity, and help it to stand out brilliantly amongst so many other synth heavy records.
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