Vancouver-based artist Ross Birdwise tugs
at and tears the rigid grid that bolsters most electronic music, warping
space-time in the process. His mutant rhythms
are both intoxicating and mind-boggling.
He has also been on a tear lately, releasing four cassettes in 2018: Drunk Formalism(s) for Orange Milk, Nine Variations for Hotham Sound, Eschatology for Collapsed Structures,
and finally this luscious set of uncanny electronics for the New Motion
imprint.
The music on Stumble is in a sense the connective tissue between Birdwise’s Frame Drag tape from 2013 and the more
recent Drunk Formalism(s) and was
conceived in the interstitial period between those releases. The gradual maturing of the compositions reveals
a producer whose confidence has grown immensely, with an oeuvre that has
expanded in complexity over the years.
Interestingly, both the artist and label refer to these sounds as being more
minimal in nature than those of his other work, but a minimal Ross Birdwise record
is still fairly maximalist in execution.
Oblique beats, shattered fragments of noise, dense melodic content, and
jarring samples are all stirred together into a heady concoction of sound. Sure, there is more breathing room here, but the
air is vaporous and thick. This is humid
music.
There are twenty-four distinct compositions
on offer here, at a running time that exceeds an hour. The track titles evoke places, dates, and
emotions (e.g., “No-Wave Suspense Thriller, Mid-1980s”) and the music calls
back to the creative core that birthed Frame
Drag. It becomes evident as soon as “Bells
Corners, 1981” kicks into gear that Birdwise is still messing with the
structures of the club. With its variable
speed, broken tape deck rhythms and suspense-filled cinematic pads, the track
is instantly gripping. A salvo of randomly
applied gut punches is applied again and again, until we’re left reeling like a
glass-jawed boxer down for the count. It’s
the attention-grabbing samples and suspenseful melodic elements that keep us
from completely losing consciousness.
Birdwise applies this method across most of the tape without the proceedings
ever veering toward the formulaic. His
limitless imagination and unwavering creativity are sustained across the
entirety of Stumble, which is a
mind-blowing feat if there ever was one.
