This boldly unconventional new release from Florida-based sound artist Josh Mason is the third installment in Greyfade’s FOLIO series (“a full-length music edition in hardcover book form”). The book, billed as “a nonlinear travelogue of the states of Florida,” is a collection of impressionistic, elliptical, and poetic ruminations on Mason’s oft-surreal environs that are “intended to be experienced simultaneously” with the music. That is quite a cool and unique idea, as it gives the album’s nine hallucinatory modular synth soundscapes a loose narrative arc and a dreamlike (and humid) sense of place. Mason’s vision is also a fresh twist on both modular synth albums and ambient music, as he sets out to capture the very specific and Lychian ambiance of brutalist concrete, decaying billboards, humming air conditioners, omnipresent mosquitoes, gas station churches, dimly lit showers, and flickering motel signs.
According to Mason, Kicking A Dark Horse “was built around a modular synthesizer framework that operates on streams of binary data” that “resists intuitive control” and “made no immediate sense to him.” That was a deliberate choice, of course, as Mason views that constraint as “a way of forcing outcomes that surprise even their maker.” In that regard, Mason shares some common ground with artists like Merzbow and Nurse With Wound, as he essentially creates a living modular system of “spinning plates” that he manipulates live, then starts recording only when “he feels them arrive at the right momentum simultaneously.” Similarly, Mason also purposely misuses and abuses his gear to yield strange and unusual sounds, patterns, and textures, with “oscillators clocked far below their operational thresholds, bit-depth data routed through mismatched converters, and delay lines treated as percussive instruments.”
Unsurprisingly, that approach produces some unique, unpredictable, and fever dream-like soundscapes, but it also produces some impressively sublime and melodic pieces as well (especially near the beginning of the album). For me, the opening “Unincorporated Community Fight Song” is the most unexpected and beautiful iteration of Mason’s vision, as it resembles swaying tropical exotica with gently popping and bubbling Pole-esque percussion, steel drum-like melodies, and an ocean breeze. It also features some alien textures and pitch shifts, however, so it lands much closer to an imagined Morton Subotnik sex jam than it does to Martin Denny. The following “Traumahawk (Volunteer Corps.)” is another sensuous highlight, as Mason channels something akin to a wistful, rainy day Oval: warm chords flicker and stutter across a quietly vibrant backdrop of hiss and crackle while blurting and effervescent melodic fragments gurgle, smear, and break apart.
While the more languorous and tropical side of Kicking A Dark Horse tends to be my favorite, there are also a few great pieces that compellingly diverge from that winning formula as well. For instance, the colder, starker “Would Go” initially evokes the queasy dissonances and seasick chords of Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works II, but unexpectedly transforms into another tropical reverie in its final moments like a nightmare gradually warming into a dream. Elsewhere, the otherwise disjointed and unstable-sounding “Repair 22,000,000” coheres into a sad, beautiful, and spectral oboe-like melody that flits through a nebula of buzzes and spacy bleeps like a flickering ghost.
While the remaining pieces are a bit less melodic and instantly gratifying, they nevertheless make for a vividly textured and immersive headphone experience, as Mason conjures an elusive series of bleary, smeared, and pointillist scenes that “arrive and dissolve without transition” like fitful dreams in a run-down and humid motel room. While there are admittedly quite a lot of artists exploring the limitless and unpredictable potential of modular synthesizers these days, there are not a hell of a lot who have been able to wrest a distinctive voice from their labyrinthine network of circuits, dials, and wires. To his credit, Mason is one of the rare exceptions, as he goes beyond merely getting cool sounds and instead elegantly harnesses chaos and instability to weave a surreal and mysterious world that is uniquely his own.
