Reviews

Igloo Magazine

When I think about the long-running Sheffield-based Audiobulb imprint, I always envision mechanical insects doing their thing—buzzing around and making strange noises as us humans try to figure them out while they continually cross our path. Such is the sound of Neuro… No Neuro’s latest album—especially evidenced on “Something Else To Tell You,” a 1-minute interlude that captures the senses instantly with its fizz-fuzz amalgamation. A stream of audible clicks and disjointed cuts flicker about as ambient undertones drift in wistful, pleasant ways—this can be heard on the chilled chords and Detroit-inspired notes of “Autumn Rain.” Each piece offered here is both uplifting and spell-binding, broken synths make room for downtempo bits and pieces (ie. “Pulling the Cords Tighter”). And what Neuro… No Neuro (aka Kirk Markarian) does very well within very short tracks (all around the 2-minute mark) is a sense of space and a constant shifting of sounds that draws the listener into its strange world. “A Moment In The Haze” wedges a darker motif of rhythmic beats tapping in the background as a fog rolls overhead. In all, The Edges Are All Wrong collects three years of the artists’ “broader set of memories, emotions, and experiences beyond the negative.” In fact, what ends up happening is that we are presented with 19-tracks of abstract electronic music that touches upon brief and surreal moments in time that will affect each listener differently. For fans of early Mille Plateaux (Oval, Alva Noto et al), NNN will appeal to those attune with minimal glitch shapes and structures that all seem to meld as a cohesive whole.

Cyclic Defrost

Neuro… No Neuro is the alias of Tucson, Arizona based electronic producer and graphic designer Kirk Markarian, and this download-only debut album ‘The Edges Are All Wrong’ represents just one of two longplayers that he’s dropped on Audiobulb this month. Markarian describes the 19 tracks collected here (which frequently come across as brief vignettes, with many of them running at less than two minutes in length) as being derived from his experiences during and after several neurosurgeries and their various side-effects.

There’s certainly all manner of ASMR-inducing clicks, whirs and hums throughout these tracks, the results almost feeling like auditory hallucinations at points over a decent pair of headphones. For the most part, the predominant mood leans towards glitchy IDM and ambient, and it’s certainly not nearly as dark as you might expect. ‘We Touch Indiscriminately’ opens proceedings with a mistlike wash of static and delicately oulsating ambient chords, before glitchy clicks and cuts begin to pick at the base of the listener’s brainstem.

If anything, ‘Fine Powder’ makes the association with exploratory surgery even more explicit, the zapping tones that suddenly materialise in the foreground evoking the high pitched resonance of an MRI, while the sudden complete drop-out of the gauzy ambient background tones suggests audio cognition treacherously stuttering in and out.

Elsewhere, ‘Pulling The Cords Tighter’ ventures out into hyper detailed beat-driven IDM as spiralling gamelan-esque arpeggios ricochet back and forth against juddering electronics and skittering broken rhythms, before ‘A Moment In The Haze’ wanders out into gorgeously tranquil phased melodic pads, the spring-loaded, almost slow-motion trap beats that roll against them adding a sharp-focus edge to the shimmering textures. All up, this is an excellent debut album from Neuro… No Neuro that sees Markarian injecting plenty of freshness into the well-explored glitch / IDM genre.