- Seven years on from Spectrum Spools' founding, it's possible to sketch out some of the label's key aspects. It's been a home for musicians who, having spent their formative years immersed in the anti-historicism of DIY noise scenes, create thoroughly 21st-century electronic music by collapsing experimental music disciplines in on themselves. Take FORMA, who interlace kosmische's bubbling arpeggios with minimalist matrices while also bopping like Stereolab. Then there's Ben Baker Billington, who, as Quicksails, constructs avant-pop strewn with scraps of cosmic jazz and Fourth World pitter-patter. But maybe the most ambitious example thus far comes from Billington's friend and fellow Chicagoan Brett Naucke. His latest album, The Mansion, an examination of his memories of his childhood home, blows out the Spectrum Spools aesthetic to new levels of complexity, density and vastness.
Naucke pours many elements and textures—synthesizers, field recordings, classical strings, piano, human voice, digital abstractions—into these uncannily designed pieces. They shapeshift so quickly that it's difficult to find anything tangible to hang onto. It's like finding yourself descending a staircase that repeatedly vanishes then rematerializes at jarring, unexpected trajectories. "Youth Organ" may blossom briefly into a classic, '70s-style synth sequence, yet its bulk consists of disorienting swells of droning hums, careening waves and static crackling like firewood. It then oozes into "Sisters," a moody beast of a track that, while fastened to colossal bass frequencies, creaks and clangs too much to get into a linear groove.
The Mansion could be seen as our young century's obsession with recombination: the digital world has destabilized old orders and institutions, and artists like Naucke reflect this with music that upends notions of genre. Yet there's also a personal aspect to this strange, indefinable music. The bulk of Naucke's releases over the last few years—including the DMT-inspired Multiple Hallucinations on Hausu Mountain—have explored his fascination with memory, visionary states and altered consciousness. (Naucke once told Red Bull Music Academy he has had a lifelong "ability to lucid dream.") A piece like "The Clocks In The Mansion" isn't an attempt to recreate the sounds of the clocks heard in his childhood home so much as capture his blurry, distorted recollections of them. As the sad, nostalgic strings slowly rise, they seem to represent the melancholy that accompanies fading memories.
Tracklist01. The Vanishing
02. Youth Organ
03. Sisters
04. Born Last Summer
05. The Clocks In The Mansion
06. Century Mirror
07. No Ceiling In The Mansion