Woodworking

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Cricklewood, Kristian's last album, was the Canadian wire-wizard's affectionate mash note to Louis and Bebe Barron, the soundsmiths of the legendary Forbidden Planet score. Woodworking may be credited to Kristian, but it's less a follow-up album than an all-star assault on Cricklewood. Remixology's sound-spindling and melody-mangling extreme is amply represented by such notorious data pirates as Rehberg & Bauer, Farmers Manual, and Goem. These well-heeled digital assassins disrupt the purr of Kristian's burbling oscillators, amplify his square-toothed waves, and generally throw their glitchtronic spanners into the works. FM's exceptional "dkRmx(crcklWd,reCnstrct,L-R/4)" is so overzealous in its deconstructive efforts that it actually comes closest to recapturing the thrill of the Barrons' out-sound innovations. In the spirit of the Barrons' original low-tech model, Half Moon Dragster's Robert Mailloux and Stefan Figiel whip up a storm of tube-screams and wind wraiths with authentic "vintage" equipment. Inchoate instead maintains the soft, arrhythmic popcorn-pulsations of Kristian's album. In contrast, Justin K. Broadrick's treatment of Cricklewood's "Cookies" finds the Techno Animal torn between the concentrated corona-flare intensity of his Solaris alter-ego and the reverb-laden, warped, and folded melodic distractions of Final. The end product is an odd ambience thoroughly tangential to Kristian's music but fascinating nonetheless. Kristian's own entry, "Hiwatt," also deviates from the expected, opting for the slow road through rump-bumping psuedo-house with a minimalist spring in its stride. Mark Poysden (The Square Root of Sub) provides the rather brilliant "Woodwind," a concrète composite of organic and mechanical noises. He takes Kristian's music in an entirely different direction, evoking the classic tape-splice talespinning of Tod Dockstader. In the absence of a totemic figure such as Autechre or Coil, the youngest hard-hitters of the IDM crew weigh in. Solvent, Kid606, Lowfish, and Phoenecia all opt to assemble Kristian's squiggles into beat-bent dance structures, the most effective of which is Kid606's squelchy rhythmic debasement of "Pangolin." By disregarding the background intent of Cricklewood, the other rhythmic turks err on the side of craftiness. Their entertaining breakbeat acrobatics only detract from the essential rawness of Kristian's Barron-esque sputters and whirrs. Still, the frantic antics of Lowfish's "Toothpick Tree" possess maximum wow-factor and can't fail to impress. Aube's arresting "Circlet," low-res dial tones building to an excited apogee of high-voltage peals, treads safer ground.