SOM

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SOM's self-titled CD arrives courtesy of the Fencing Flatworm imprint, a CD-R-based offshoot of Leeds' long-running Termite club. Already legendary in certain circles as the producer of such classics of post-rave ephemera as 'Life as a Crunchy Biscuit' and 'Music to Defragment Your Hard Drive To', the work of SOM's Jeremy Smith is perhaps best understood in the context of an English eccentrism defined, at one extreme, by Nurse With Wound's Stephen Stapleton and, at the other, by inventor Clive Sinclair. While Smith's music, with its crunchy, cut-to-shreds drum programming and tangled, pretzel-like basslines, might initially seem more reminiscent of IDM's obsessive byte-crunching than Stapleton's delicate, allusive sound collages, in fact SOM mines a seam of sonic bricolage as strange, and as resonant, as any explored by NWW. Listen to 'Boom Boom Boom' or 'Mad Ruse': where IDM audiences demand faux-naïve melodies and warm analogue tones, here one finds discordant drones, flurries of out-of-time scratching, the beep and warble of dying arcade machines. Equally, like the ZX Spectrum with its horrid rubber keys, these tracks wear their shortcomings openly, as an integral part of the music's texture; while the sickening glitch and rasp of distortion may be anathema to some, 'professionalism' here comes second to invention.

One criticism often levelled at CD-R culture, rather like that aimed at 'vanity' publishing, is that this is hobbyist music, mere time-filling. Smith appears to have anticipated such attacks: on 'Baby Drove a Spaceship', one of two vocal tracks here, he sings "I'm stargazing into your eyes / Open the airlock, suddenly I'm vapourised." According to Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, 'withal, "Star-Gazing" in those parts was a young man's term for masturbating.' What the Church stigmatised as self-abuse, however, has always played an essential part in alchemy: how else might the fluids necessary for the creation of homunculi be gathered? SOM makes plain the connection - so often obscured - between the hermetic and the hermitic.