Album First Listens: You Fantastic! - Riddler EP (1996)

alright, pretty interesting and thought provoking

ok, so since this is an experimental rock project, it's not so much about the musical enjoyment you can get out of it but rather the ideas and concept it gives you. this ep plays out like a single track, with each of its tracks switching over seamlessly. it seems to establish that the main two devices within this ep are the presence and the absence of noise.

1st track: It starts off on a micro level, simple enough with a hard-hitting almost industrial drumbeat and kinda hard-cuts away to a single guitar and slowly introduces more guitars (and reintroduces that same drumbeat but muted this time) all playing discordant and strumming weird riffs that slowly build in cacophony... while the drumbeat dies down inversely.

2nd track: the multitude of guitars continues to pluck chaotically and discordantly without any interruption and become more and more dull and hard to make out as time goes by, as if it were being drowned out.

3rd track: the droning of the guitars is cut out by a more conventional drumbeat, and they slowly dwindle in number and decrease in volume as the drumbeat continues, till the point where it is now the drumbeat that is playing by itself.

4th track: the drumbeat is immediately halted by the presence of a new instrument: horns. slowly, just like the guitars before, more and more horns begin to chime in and play discordant and deadening notes. just like before, after a while the sounds begin to be drowned out.

5th track, titled riddler 5 (EP): as the horns lower their volume, a lone guitar plucking that same string resurfaces and fades away. the very first drumbeat returns gradually, slowly building in volume until there is nothing left. a cycle begins, where the same process happens; hard cut to the guitars like in track 1. however this time there is a sudden chaotic burst of sound that cuts off at the last second.

6th track: silence for 13 seconds

7th track: a single guitar strums and plays chords in a more cohesive and less jarring style. around the 35th second mark a drummer enters and plays softly. everything is fine until there is another sudden burst of energy that slaps you in the face. immediate cutaway to nothingness and silence for the rest of the track

8th track: the silence continues. sudden radio static and a discordant dangerous wall of sound suddenly comes back. although at first shocking (with some aftershocks due to small reintroductions of more waves of sounds in addition to the main bulk of it periodically) gradually the listener accepts it and becomes used to it, having gone through this cycle multiple times now. nearing the end, a single repetition on the closed hi-hat as well as a coherent bass-line manage to escape from the hold of the rest of the chaotic sound.

9th track: the hihat and bass-line get sucked right back into the horde of noise and the distortion on the cymbals starts to become more prevalent, slowly drowning everything out with a metallic wash of sound.

10th track: the metallic, robotic sound blends into the sound of wind and distorted static, almost as if it was coming out of a small radio in the middle of a dilapidated room somewhere, or coming from a set of earphones. you hear the soft whirring of a gigantic machine somewhere. everything fades out slowly to be masked with silence. 

pretty interesting how an entire world was able to be formed entirely in sound in just a short 15 mins. 

I feel like there definitely are a bunch of real life experiences and concepts that can be likened to the kind of journey that this ep brings you on, but the one i feel it most likely is referencing how the media portrays the cycle of war and how a consumer of such media feels and experiences the intake of this information, with each of the instruments representing a group within this set-up situation.

one thing i feel was also possibly what [you fantastic!] intended was to make a commentary on the idea of the listener, a being that can only experience things secondhand. amid all the chaos that the horde of sound creates, the listener is alienated from the experience that possibly could be seen as normal for someone that is experiencing it firsthand (frequency to the point where it is drowned out) and is forced into this very foreign feeling. the final track "zooming out" to a hollow noise nowhere near how it was perceived firsthand reveals the reality that the listener has actually been listening to a recording of something and highlights the disconnect between "how we perceive it" vs. "how it actually is".

might seem like a bunch of incomprehensible noise until you take a moment to analyse, very interesting

Originally posted on Musicboard on 31 May 2021