All Spec Kit: Busy Topic
Komplott
If “All Spec Kit is pop music,” as sound artist Andreas Kurtsson claims, it must be pop music of some parallel galaxy. Alien rhythms and grooves stumble through Busy Topic's nine tracks, with Kurtsson generating them from found objects, damaged instruments, field elements, and electronically treated sounds. Amidst noises of a restaurant or bar, a laconic pulse coalesces from a pairing of anemic saxophone squeals and glistening electronic timbres in “Girl Bag” while humming machines spring to life atop a stuttering base of grime-infested surges and ripples in the densely textured “My Busy Fingers.” And when a similarly seasick groove of random plunks and clatter emerges in “Polka Tiger,” one realizes that Kurtsson is accurate in characterizing his music as “individual sounds that play together, but remain deaf to each other.” Throughout the album, music perpetually teeters on the brink, equally capable of assuming greater coherence and stability or collapsing into total disarray; consequently, discomfiting tension permeates the listening experience. Further unease comes from the sounds themselves which, though originating from electronic and acoustic sources, are manipulated and challenge identification. “Speck It / Späcka Det,” for example, teems with percussive clatter and convulsive lurches but resemblances to conventional instrumentation are few; recognizable glimmerings of organ, on the other hand, pierce the burbling pockets of hiss in “The Smell Of Technology,” lending some semblance of normalcy to it. These are explorative and mercurial fields of sonic abstraction, full of unusual tendrils that extend along unexpected pathways. That can make for appealing results (the surging lurch and faint glissandi of an imagined Venusian marching troupe in “Diskot”) as well as some that are less so (annoying horn squeals in “Do Or Rood,” for example, end the album on a dispiriting note).
April 2005
