Test Shot Starfish: Test Shot Starfish
Kanpai Records

I'll concede that, before listening to Test Shot Starfish's eponymous debut, I didn't have terribly high hopes for it. Typically, when sound designers like Kyle Schember and Ryan Stuit branch out beyond their video company day jobs into music production, the results can be half-hearted. (Since meeting on an LA film set in 1999, the two have presented multimedia live performances, remixed tracks for artists like Lenny Kravitz, Coldplay, Gus Gus, and Snoop Dogg, and worked with clients like Showtime, ESPN, Toyota, and others.) Mediocre artwork is also a generally reliable indicator and on that level Test Shot Starfish doesn't disappoint: the album cover's illustrative collage must be at least twenty years out of date. Finally, the press material's banal description of the group's sound as “an eclectic blend of electronica, techno, and ambient music that inspires a sensory experience” doesn't inspire much hope either.

Well, surprisingly, the album isn't all that bad and, in fact, is sometimes pretty good. While its twelve excursions into glitchy, synth-heavy atmospheres and intricate beat structures aren't groundbreaking by any stretch, they're still credible forays into Warp territory. A woodsy clarinet brings some nice contrast to the sparkling IDM of the opener “Souvenirs” while “B Plan” alternates episodically between the glistening melodicism of Plaid and the crunchy beat stabs of Autechre. In “Sort Of,” The Orb appears to be none-too-subtly referenced by the duo's use of voice samples and the insistent chug of spacey beat patterns. Test Shot Starfish incorporates dated voice samples in other songs too ('science fiction' in “Souvenirs, for instance), a tendency the group would be wise to retire.

Admittedly, there's little about Test Shot Starfish that's original and it's hardly genre-defying; it is, however, a consistently solid hour of classic IDM that's executed with craft and polish. In the end, the group atones for its lack of originality with enthusiastic delivery. Though listeners will be more than a little familiar with the sounds of skittish drum'n'bass patterns and buzzing synths in “Polaris,” for example, there's no denying the intensity of the performance.

August 2005