Psy-Fi
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Category: Music CD
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CD Details
Performer: Zero OneEdition: Music CD
CD Release Date: 2004-01-13
Music Label: Spiralight
Soundtracks:
- transfer
- robots
- continuum
- bu_ist
- transformation
- reality
- dreamworld
- consciousness
- causality
- megalomania
Music reviews of Psy-Fi
Music Review: Beyond the Binary
Rating: 5 Stars
I'm a fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000, and whenever I pop in a new ambient-trance CD, I think back to a short bit from the Pod People episode of that show. A character named Joel is mocking the movie's spacey New Age soundtrack. Behind him is a wall of keyboards. "Here's how you make a New Age album," he tells his buddy Crow. "Hold down any key on the synthesizer." Crow does. "Now hold down another key." Crow does. "Now hold it down until you get a record deal from Windham Hill," Joel says.
New Age music is a comfy genre to undertake, is the point, a refuge for people with hydrogenated brain pans and the "skill" to find a handful of ethereal chords that can swim sleepily together. If you're talking about background noise for slowly sifting clouds or nebulous universal ballets, it doesn't take much to please people. Anyone with eight fingers can slow-step through a Casio keyboard and patch together a creeptastic theme song for the delicate waver of an incense stick's tangerine fume.
Kevin Dooley, mastermind behind ZerO One, seems to be aware of this. His music winks at the cheesy New Age genre that inspired it, without succumbing to anything other than the minimalist tribal rhythms and thought-scapes that help it transcend the great troughs of trance's wasteland. It's not easy to find, among the vast array of CDs with happy be-fluted hippies and Gaia-glorified album covers, something that's worth owning. I'll be the first to say that almost none of it is really bad; if you want music you can put on and then immediately ignore, most albums will do the trick. But how to find something that digs in? I'm reminded of an old Bugs Bunny cartoon where the gray aroma of a cooling carrot pie slinks through the air to Bugs' rabbit hole, reaches down with dangerously sexy fingers, and pulls him gently backwards through the air, toward its frangrant source. There you go. Don't you want music like that?
Sweet Nag Champa, here are a couple of albums for you, then.
ProtOtype 2 is Dooley's sophomore effort, coming after his eponymous debut, and it's a slyly sublime stitching together of ambient funk with more aggressive psychedelic dub-work. Dooley doesn't let the rhythms waver into the insubstantial mists common to most dreamy chill-out mixes. Songs like "innEr spAce" and "seArch" sound like they're heading into the well-worn treads of trippy territory, but Dooley swings the melodic arc around at the last minute. It's an album that keeps you off your guard; it's good to spread your toes to, but it refuses to dwell in subconscious realms. The album is bookended by the best cuts: "pOssibilities" with its creepy cheeky congo-counter-rhythms, "memOry" with its nasty nascence (and a saxophone at its carmelized core; perhaps a nod to Dooley's first experience with a musical instrument), and "mOdule" with its funky come-hither come-down. There are some progressions that stretch out to breezy thinness, where the ambience wears itself to thread-bare dimensions, but Dooley doesn't wait long to fatten those moments up with his trademark turns in tone.
"pSy-fI" is, for my money, a far more accomplished record, a melodic novel of dewy jungle jazziness melded to an aura that is laid-back without being lazy. Although most of the tracks on "ProtOtype" are great, they don't really measure up to the stellar equatorial warmth of "pSy-fI"s spiritually cerebral lankiness. "COntinuum" is as slow and expansive as a jet plane's vapor trail. "TransfOrmation" grinds through xylophonic chorales with a sexual flair. And "causalitY" (my favorite track), is a one-track snapshot of the entire album: a tribal shoulder-mover, a nimble neck massage, a solar story with fifteen chapters. Even better, "pSy-fI" contains animations (although some are a little low-rent and cheesy) and four mp3 bonus tracks, all of which are stellar additions to the rest of the disk.
Trance, New Age, Chillout ... call it what you will; "artists" for years have been using the label as an excuse to churn out passively pointless and unremarkable "music" for years. Do yourself a favor: grab some ZerO One and discover just what it means to be entranced, relearn the "new" in New Age, and see how warm and exciting even a "chillout" album can be.
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