VA: The Reprogramming Project
Plastic Supply Company

Now here's an imaginative way to maximize resources: have three innovative producers create compositions, then set them loose on each others' pieces, and finally finish it off with three mashups where all material's open for plunder. True to its name, The Reprogramming Project draws upon the talents of CacheFlowe (Justin Gitlin), Scaffolding, and Wayne Winters in bringing to life a sprawling fifty minutes of chopped glitch-hop and experimental boom-bap.

Less a dreary than trippy sojourn, CacheFlowe's opening “A Dreary Flight Over the Datascape” floats through a multi-hued galaxy of synthetic swirls, low-end beat rumble, and jittery whirr and click, while Winters alters the original by chopping vocals and deepening the tune's funky head-nod. Sarah Marcogliese adds vocal entrancement to Scaffolding's atmospheric “Rebuild” and in the process nudges the material in the direction of trip-hop. In this most memorable original of the three, dark tones see-saw and funereal beats softly hammer while Marcogliese's dreamy voice grows increasingly desperate. In their remixes, Winters reduces her words to a percolating flow of syllabic stutter while CacheFlowe shreds her vocals in a convulsive boom-bap treatment. Winters paints his “Precious Moments” original as a muted gloomscape populated by swollen synth flourishes and curdling beat patterns, to which CacheFlowe adds bass wobble and laid-back swing in the overhaul.

To their credit, the producers shy away from overkill in their mash-ups and consequently the transition into the album's final quarter is seamless rather than disruptive; if anything, the tracks' snappy, early-morning feel (Winters' atmospheric and CacheFlowe's dub-inflected) makes for a surprisingly restrained exeunt to the album. Simpatico denizens of the Denver, Colorado experimental scene, the trio's beatsmithing forays turn out to be stylistically close enough to one another to sound complementary yet contrasting enough to be differentiated from one another.

September 2008