Reviews

XLR8R Top Ten

The cover of this disc–a girl clad in white standing in a bleak, wintery woodland–hints at the contents of this release, the latest from Midwest-born producer Erik Schoster. Combining dreamy pop music with experimental electronics (not to mention an arsenal of bells, harps, acoustic guitars, laptop-processed bleeps, and static), he has created an album that would please both laptop scientists and kids wanting something pretty to listen to while driving a car. And yes, the album is named after the George Eliot novel.

The Silent Ballet

I was never familiar with He Can Jog - in fact, I had never even heard of the Brooklyn based experimental techno jockey until I took on MiddleMarch. Dear lord, was I missing out.

MiddleMarch is a glorious mishmash of kinky synths and danceable beats, endlessly hooking the listener into toe-tapping, mind-boggling, ear-blasting euphoria. A laptop musician extraordinaire, He Can Jog's music has the production quality of a full blown studio release from Warp, without losing the home-made, DIY character that amateur computer musicians round the world strive for. His cuts are progressive without losing the edge and focus of rhythm and structure that keeps a listener wanting more. MiddleMarch owes a lot to acts like Proem and The Flashbulb, who moved techno and IDM away from the Audiovisual Club mentality of gear-over-substance and focused on making the music fun, catchy, and real. That sense of reality is what will keep me listening to He Can Jog for many, many months. The powerful, staggering presence of warmth and texture in MiddleMarch is beautifully jarring compared to last year. 2007 was a year of cold, heartless electronica. 2008 is proving completely different, delivering sensible electronic acts with a slew of raw, personal offerings. The four part suite series on MiddleMarch is reason alone to call He Can Jog the next Benn Jordann or Aaron Funk. I know comparing an unestablished bedroom producer to these gods of the modern electronic realm might seem a tad drastic, but there is no doubt in my mind that He Can Jog will aspire to meet and even exceed the achievements of these artists, and in no time will prove himself as a force to be reckoned with in the coming years. I do hate drawing such blatant comparisons when He Can Jog's sound is incredibly original, but I will say that the excitement and enthusiasm brought to the table on MiddleMarch reminds me of Arctic Hospital, my favorite new star in the electronic world, though He Can Jog is not a distant second by any means. I've said it before and I'll say it again: the place to find tomorrow's stars is Audiobulb Records. The label knows exactly what makes the digital music world tick. Well done, He Can Jog. Well done.

Ear Labs

RATED: 9.5 / 10  

Reviewed by  Larry Johnson

He Can Jog is sound sculptor (and co-director of the Luvsound netlabel) Erik Schoster from Madison,  Wisconsin. If you visit his website you’ll notice that it’s interestingly subtitled “homebrewed Midwestern electronic nonsense” with the word “nonsense” being used (at least to my way of thinking) in the context of “fun noise.” Some four years in the making, Middlemarch is Erik’s debut release on Audiobulb and provides yet another instance of the label’s commitment to releasing exceptional exploratory electronic music. 

Even though He Can Jog is an anagram of John Cage, Erik’s compositions are no where close to being Cageian-like. The music on Middlemarch (named after the classic George Elliot novel) is a heartfelt, entertaining, and perplexing flurry of sonic excitement consisting of warm melodies, lively broken beats, occasional vocals, and flickering tones inspired by the intersections of intimate collections of memories. It's a whimsical blend of folk-pop influences, IDM flavorings, and hazy ambient textures. Erik's method of composing makes use of software programming, acoustic instrument samples, electronic production, and improvisation via the manipulation of sounds using custom-built patches.

I have to admit that Middlemarch is not the usual kind of experimental electronic music that I listen to or review. After receiving the promo copy and hearing it or the first time, I had pretty much decided that it was not something that I could write about. However, I’ve learned that first impressions are quite often deceiving and found that to be the case here. Repeated listening and a thorough reading of the notes that accompanied the disc revealed an underlying richness in compositional style/content and emotional intensity that one casual listening just doesn’t reveal. So here's an album of serious, skillfully composed experimental electronic music that's able to bring a smile to my face by simply being exciting, entertaining, uplifting, and just plain fun to listen to?

While some listeners might at least initially be put off by the quirky blend of folk, pop, IDM, and ambient elements that went into the making of the nine eclectic works comprising Middlemarch, a little more unbiased and considerate listening will reveal the same compositional vitality and emotional depth that I came to realize. Middlemarch is an important release for Erik personally being as it is a kind of sonic memoir detailing a few years of his life, and he "counts the whole record as a catalogue of these memories of people and places and his own process of becoming."

Boomkat

A fine example of modern electronica, He Can Jog's Middlemarch is a boldly diverse set of compositions, tackling dronescapes, digital glitch textures and even vocal electronic pop to a consistently high standard. At He Can Jog's creative epicentre is Erik Schoster, who combines the offline conventions of electronic composition with real-time improvisation via customised MAX patches. This combination of different disciplines results in the raw bitstream ambience of 'Agnes (After Woodland Pattern)' or 'A Small Thing' whilst also bringing forth the melodic, beat-driven sounds of 'Suite Part Three'. There's an adventurously unpolished feel to all this that suggests an abandonment of presets or software clichés, freeing up Schoster to switch things around on wildly divergent consecutive tracks like 'Contractors And Architects', with its borderline Postal Service-isms and 'Suite Parts One And Two', which approaches Keith Fullerton Whitman levels of sublime electroacoustic drone. Highly recommended.

The Milk Factory

The strangely named He Can Jog is one of the many projects of Brooklyn-based sound artist Erik Schoster who focuses primarily on textural sound explorations. Originally from Madison, Wisconsin, Schoster spent his formative years studying composition and improvisations. In the last four years, he has released a handful of MP3 EPs and his work has also been featured on a few compilations, including on no less than four from Sheffield’s excellent Audiobulb, which have been nurturing his talent for some time. It is therefore only fair that they got to release Middlemarch, the follow up to his debut album, New Ground Has Not Broken, Soil Last Week And Dirt Today, released in 2004.

Right from the onset of Suite Part Four, which opens, Schoster establishes an elegant laptopestry made of interferences, glitches and statics upon which he builds subtle little melodic pieces which often develop into gentle layered miniature symphonies, usually contained within three-to-five minute compositions. The album seems articulated around the four Suites, beginning, as mentioned above with Part Four, Suite Part Three following a couple of tracks in and the epic Suite Parts One And Two, which closes the album. The remaining compositions stand very well on their own however, whether it is the short interludes Dials, with its minimal drone-like setting, or A Small Thing, with its bubbling statics and embryo of melody which originally fails to develop, but finally comes to life on Contractors And Architects, the only vocal track on the album, or with more fully formed tracks. Surprisingly upbeat and clearly defined against the rest of the album, the refined Suite Part Three is in part reminiscent of Four Tet circa Pause, but this is in no way a criticism as Schoster does this kind of things rather well. My (Mother’s) Records, which follows, combines processed acoustic guitars, found sounds and sliced vocal samples into a much tightly woven ball of sounds.

The album then veers toward slightly darker and colder grounds with Agnes (After Woodland Pattern) and Pan-Fried Fern, which, although remaining sonically close to the rest of the album, appear to echo the foggy atmosphere of the cover photograph, which shows a young girl, bare feet, walking in a wintry woodland. The piece de resistance of Middlemarch comes with concluding piece Suite Parts One And Two, which develops over twelve and a half minutes and two distinct sections, the first one appearing like a stripped down version of the second, where Schoster deploys the richest soundscapes and melodies of the record. 

With Middlemarch, He Can Jog’s Erik Schoster has created a rather beautiful and intimate record which delights and charms all the way through, thanks to carefully crafted sound formations and melodies which continuously grow and develop. Middlemarch is one of these records that procure continuous listening pleasure by somehow giving the impression of never sounding quite the same twice. 4/5

White_Line

He Can Jog – a nifty little anagram of John Cage, perhaps takes some of its influence from the Great Man in terms of innovative solutions and skewed approaches. This is a charming, engaging little piece that invites instant comparisons to Brit minimalist composers, The Boats, or Mole Harness. U.S based Erik Schoster is the personality behind He Can Jog, and on Middlemarch, we see him inviting a cluster of musicians to augment and filter through his works. Most prominent are the cut and paste-type pieces that use fractured harmonies, and layered beats and blips. There are a variety of solutions on display here, that echo a truly post modern canvas, covering everything from the dripping melancholia of “Agnes (after woodland pattern)”, with its soothing harmonics and lilting loops, to the itchy minimalism of “Pan – Fried Fern”.” “Contractors and Architects” is essentially a mini pop melody, infused with vocals from Nick Sanborn, and has an infectious, bubbly refrain, with little of the rest of the album’s cut and slice approach.

Throughout the collection, there are various surreal interruptions and interventions, oddly placed narratives, and words appearing as if from nowhere, that locate themselves outside of the pieces, yet somehow cohere with it at the same time. Non-linearity is the order of the day, with each narrative being spliced and grafted onto other elements in an unsettling, but highly engaging assemblage. To use the word “collage” would perhaps be a little trite, but this is indeed a fresh and expertly crafted CD that takes digital composition to some kind of logical extreme. If this is the future of modern composition, then count me in, and once again, Audiobulb asserts itself as a highly intelligent, innovative promoter of the digital (and post–digital) aesthetic. BGN

Textura

A generally inviting exercise in warm electronic melodicism, MiddleMarch by He Can Jog (yes, the title purposefully references George Eliot's novel and the alias adopted by laptop knob-twiddler and one-time trombonist Erik Schoster is an anagram of John Cage) inverts the usual template by spreading beats more freely over songs anchored by emotive keyboard melodies—but that's just one of the oblique strategies Schoster brings to the table. Accompanied by a handful of guests (who contribute Rhodes, Vibes and guitar samples, field recordings, and vocals), Schoster works a community theme into the album (hence the title choice) as it documents not only the evolution in his working methods—sampling, software programming, and electronic synthesis all figure in—over a four-year span, but also his interpersonal experiences during that time.

Some pieces are experimental and explorative in character: a collage-like scattering of elements constitutes “My (Mother's) Records” (not entirely successfully either, as dropping the line “The songs we're now hearing are ancient tunes” into its middle seems a little too cute), and deeply textured masses of flickering starbursts flow through “Agnes (After Woodland Pattern),” “Pan-Fried Fern,” and “A Small Thing.” More immediately appealing is the material that gravitates towards sparkling electronic pop: “Contractors and Architects,” composed and sung by Nick Sanborn, could pass for a sample track by Morr Music's latest signing, while the keyboard melodies in “Suite Part Three” could single-handedly lull the crankiest infant to sleep. Both tendencies coalesce in the twelve-minute meditation “Suites Part One and Two” whose becalmed arrangement of glistening bells and tonal shimmer closes the album strongly. 

Neural IT

With the anagrammatized moniker 'He Can Jog', sound artist Erik Schoster pays tribute to John Cage, master and seminal experimenter. Cage remains an essential point of reference, especially for those who still wonder about the complex compositional structures in contemporary music. It's not by chance, then, that in 'Middlemarch' the attention seems focused on texture, gently twisted by glitches, interferences and clicks, creating a dreamy atmosphere, never trivial, but sensitive and delicate. It is high quality laptop music, with some "pop" taste and nuanced electronica that combines well with Bryan Teoh images [equally rarefied and multifaceted] during live performances. The record was composed using Max/MSP. The tracks present different attitudes in a painstaking and intricate way, without ever "punishing" the listener. It's minimalism and melody colliding in floating sonorities, a little melancholic, mixed with ambient and folk.

The Wire (293)

He Can Jog is an anagram of John Cage, but thankfully that's as groanworthy as Madison, Winsconsin's Erik Schoster's solo album gets. The album takes its title from the George Eliot novel because it is about how one develops as a person through interaction with a particular community. Schoster draws on his own memories of friends and acquaintances in Winsconsin and Milwaukee, where he also spends some of his time. Despite its irregular rhythmic intervals and heavy, thorough treatments, using, for example, custom programmed Max patches and sampled acoustic instruments, the overall effect of Middlemarch is benign. This is fine, because what the album is really about is memories and memory associations - the way recollections of people and places are filtered, preserved, distorted and cherished. The music reflects that in the stresses, overdubs and processes it has undergone, most sublimely on "Agnes (After Woodland Patern)".

Igloo Magazine

Brooklyn-based sound artist Erik Schoster is the man behind the quirkily dubbed He Can Jog - a playful scrambling of the letters in 'John Cage.' Appositely named in that Middlemarch is itself both quirky and playful in equal measure, mixed with moments of greater gravitas to form a sad-happy combo of sideways -on wistful pop instrumentalism and mercurial experimental electronica. Schoster's stock-in-trade is the cut-and-paste splice'n'dice aesthetic, within which he creates collages with fractured harmonies, layered beats, and a gallimaufry of harps, acoustic guitars, bells and whistles (ok, hold the whistles).

Those of literary bent will have picked up on the symbolism of Middlemarch - a titular borrowing from George Eliot's novel - emblematic of a theme of personal development through community interaction. Schoster evidently draws on his memories of past friends for the moments of emotional caché in a nostalgia-steeped excursion (he also deploys some of them as guest musicians). Right from the onset of opener, "Suite Part Four," Schoster seeks to tailor a winsome laptopiary of error-driven tonalities and static-streaked backgrounds against which to project his melodic miniatures. Despite its episodic rhythms and heavy-duty digi re-dos (Max-ed out MSP), Middlemarch has about it an air of affectionate engagement.

Structurally, the album seems articulated around four so-called 'Suites,' the opening "...Part Four" and the concluding "...Parts One and Two" acting as bookends. The remainder are largely episodic sketches, ranging from the lull-a-tone melancholics of "Agnes (After Woodland Pattern)," to the nervous glitchery of "Pan-fried Fern” to the toytown indietronica of "Contractors and Architects" - out of Morr Music via The Postal Service. This latter infelicity, along with one or two others, are indicative of critical faculties going AWOL; as, again, when software and cut-up fetishism are overindulged on "My (Mother's) Records," processed guitar, found sounds and vocal fragments sliced up into a glitch-cum-turntablist mash-up of little effect other than enervation. The short interludes "Dials," with its minimal drone-like setting, and "A Small Thing," with its play of static and melody are more likeable,  as is the blithe and breezy refinement of "Suite Part Three," a more solidly rhythmic composition bearing echoes of The Album Leaf or mid-period Four Tet.

The ludic playroom air of much of He Can Jog has a heady froth/frothy head. But it's vitiated by a lack of 'body' registering increasingly at the album's (lack of) centre. This seems to have set in until the album's final musical act, a less mannered two-hander of harmonious glisten and shimmer spread over 12+ minutes. Digi-doodle tendencies reined in, He Can Jog here comes on like Keith Fullerton Whitman in a more expansive electro-acoustic drone-drift mode, "Suite Parts One and Two" being good enough to require an adjustment of egg idiom in final appraisal: Middlemarch - not a bad one, more like the curate's... Good in parts. 

Cyclic Defrost

He Can Jog hinges upon the notion that one needs others in order to think for oneself - that the enrichment of thought depends on encounters with others and their involvements in life. Ergo the albums content, which revolves around the distortion, confusion, and invention brought about by others, but also its form: a tightly-knit community of prickly guitars, trills of synths, percolating electronics and seesawing fuzz. Above all, though, the music breathes; vocals run up against and are cut-up into pointillist beats, rebounding percussive loops mesh with swarms of high pitches, and keyboard lines spring up from their reverie to provide arpeggiated counterpoint to warm, wooden knocking and nagging, choppy cascades of electronics. There’s something of a taste for dramatic assemblage, too, with Erik Schoster often forming clean, glistening melodies like oysters forming around grit. “Suite Part Four”, for one, creates a maze of ethereal harmonics, in which a warm, near-celebratory bell pattern circles around itself as though in a daze, before the whole thing is broken open by a propulsive plastic rhythm. Schoster often switches between styles with some skill, but occasionally their combination proves problematic, as there’s a certain tentativeness in the music that is probably the result of the attempt to find commonalities in the musics various participants. The odd piece, such as “My (Mothers) Records”, thus sounds like a less than favorable compromise. Among others, though, the twelve minute closer, “Suite Parts One and Two”, reasserts the strong suites of this digital etherealism - its tolling bells and a computerized firestorm hover over and rain down on a churning drone, evoking the massive presence of an environment awaking from hibernation. Max Schaefer.

Immersive

US-based composer Erik Schoster brings his latest guise "He Can Jog" (anagram of the great experimental composer Johnny Cage) in a brilliantly organic album composition titled "Middlemarch". One third of the Milwaukee trio "Cedar AV", Erik studies composition formally under Erica Mather and Joanne Metcalf and improvisation with Matt Turner and Jennifer Fitzgerald at Lawrence University.

Middlemarch's Highlights are certainly "Suite part Three" with its rolling, warm Rhodes trills and engaging beats and effects. "Agnes" holds a real organic, truly free and ambient feel and "contractors" is a wonderful example of true glitch without being messy with its intricate beats and Hot Chip style vocals. "Suite parts one and two" expand on the ambiance with its glacial synths, soft noise and reversed, detuned twangs and pads.

Some very sweet moments of audio mastery and experimentation, complex textures and beats make this album a actual joy and distinct discovery of sound. In truth not an album for everyone, but a real innovation to those who crave something new and out of the ordinary. Not a genre breaker as such but a good contender for electronic creativity. Reminiscent of Four Tet, but unique enough to carry itself off as a good album. Well produced and an honest thrill to listen to. 8 / 10

Silent Ballet

Just when the electronic scene was becoming a bit stagnant, overrun with minimal copyist or electro fodder, out of nowhere comes He Can Jog with his delightful Middlemarch. The ambient hum of “Agnes (After Woodland Pattern)” sits next to the Postal Service-esque pop of “Contractors and Architects” while everything in between, from IDM to minimal, is executed with great aplomb. While still rooted in IDM nostalgia, there is an organic quality lying deep within Middlemarch that makes it inherently accessible, real and, ultimately, enjoyable. (James Ould)

Vital Weekly

He Can Jog is an anagram of John Cage. It's the name chosen by Erik Schoster from Madison, Wisconsin. He studied composition and improvisation and plays with Cedar AV. His music is entirely made on the computer, and if you know what this label released before then you may already have an idea what he Can Jog is about. Bouncy beats, here even more than elsewhere, samples of guitars, voices, a bit of ambient. If I honest I say that I was reading this mornings newspaper when I put this on and I thought it was quite alright background music, but when I started writing, replaying, and listening more carefully, I thought it was a bit less than what I first anticipated. It sounds all a bit worn out. The Oval approaches, the Fennesz bendings, the IDM broken beats, the funny weirdness. Maybe I am getting too old for this line of musical business, but however nice this is, it just didn't do too much for me. (FdW)