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Anthony Pateras & Robin Fox, "Flux Compendium"
The second album by Pateras and Fox finds them raiding the human body for sounds and reorganizing them in convulsive detail. Their improvisations logically find the duo favoring texture over form, yet after a while the constantly shifting dynamics becomes a form of motionlessness in itself and at times I found my mind wandering.
The natural sources of the material surface only fleetingly before drowning in a tide of processed electronics. "Olfactophobia" uses flapping cheeks, heavy breathing, mouth pops, gasps, and kissing sounds in the creation of bubbles and percolations that sound surprisingly organic, while "Throat in Three Parts" sounds more like amplified molecules moving through the bloodstream and colliding with each other than it does specific throat noises. "Flux and Belch," consisting of processed belches and throat eruptions, is a fitting end to a feast of bodily transformation. The sounds they come up with are frequently entertaining, but often it seems that Pateras and Fox are running through a catalog of possibilities for these sources rather than arriving at a destination. Not every track has an obvious connection to the body, and a couple of them that don’t are among the better tracks on the album. "Freckle Cream" initially sounds like ruptured speakers crackling before beeps, twonks, and rips intrude, culminating in a rhythmic interplay of white noise that ends just as the song heads into exciting territory. "$2.18," conceivably named after the amount of currency involved, uses dropped coins as percussion to feed metallic clatters and droning overtones that, because of the brevity of the piece, never feel distracting. The juxtapositions Pateras and Fox concoct along their fantastic voyage are enjoyable enough, but I felt many of these tracks are intellectual exercises as much as musical ones, which kept me from fully enjoying them as a visceral experience.
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