Menu

Rashad Becker

a0237929655_16

Rashad Becker, “The Incident” (Clunk, 2025)

,

This is both the inaugural release for Becker’s Clunk label and his first new album in nearly a decade, but it stylistically picks up roughly where his brilliantly demented Traditional Music of Notional Species series left off (grotesquely gnarled and squirming synth hallucinations beamed in from an alien jungle). Intended as a “labyrinthine four-chapter pseudo-musical that reflects the flustering absurdity of the current era,” The Incident feels like the fruit of a Lovecraftian scenario in which Becker is plagued by recurring nightmares of an otherworldly city populated by slime-covered and tentacled horrors and wakes up each morning with a fresh batch of disturbing field recordings documenting those extradimensional travels. 

The primary allure is that Becker conjured up some truly ungodly sounds here, as it sounds like he circuit-bent a modular synth to make everything sound as viscerally slithering, gibbering, and gelatinous as possible. Notably, he also happens to be one of the greatest mastering engineers on the planet, which further helped shape this album into an immersive headphone mindfuck par excellence. That said, there have been some notable evolutions since Notional Species II as well, as Becker seems to play with spatial dynamics a bit more and also seems to have picked up a fresh gamelan influence. The more gamelan-inspired pieces all fall on the second half of the album (“stunde null,” “sāʿatu alṣṣufri,” and a “puttering purgation”) and every single one is a highlight evocative of a remote, ruined, and overgrown jungle temple where something ineffably ghastly and otherworldly has just been summoned. 

Of the three, “sāʿatu alṣṣufri” is the most strikingly novel, as the metallic percussion and vaguely Middle Eastern-sounding snatches of melody give it the feel of a ritualistic procession and Becker works some truly impressive magic in his gleeful distortion of the metal sounds. The closing epic “what really happened” is the album’s zenith, however, as it opens with a motif akin to a small jazz ensemble that is time-stopped and glitching out within the creaking timbers of a collapsing building, then builds into an incredibly dense, undulating, and all-engulfing maelstrom of smeared drones. Despite that, it still somehow feels weirdly meditative and thoughtfully composed, which is quite an impressive feat given the sheer derangement and alien nature of the sounds themselves. Notably, this album is billed as a precursor to a new series of works entitled “based on a true story,” so I am eagerly looking forward to an expansion of this world into further vistas that resemble an alien body horror soundtrack performed exclusively using disturbingly misused balloons. In the meantime, The Incident unquestionably keeps Becker’s unbroken streak of boldly unique and wildly creative sound art masterpieces fully intact.

Listen here.    

a0627044556_16

Rashad Becker, “Traditional Music of Notional Species Vol. II” (PAN, 2017)

,

Rashad Becker’s 2013 debut album was a singular and radical work of art, resembling nothing less than field recordings from a sinister extra-dimensional jungle. For this follow-up, however, he apparently opted not to try to blow my mind a second time and instead just deepened and expanded upon what he had already done previously. Naturally, the second volume is every bit as deranged and wrong-sounding as the first, so my favorite hallucinatory and Lovecraftian aural nightmare essentially just became twice as long. I am quite fine with that state of affairs.

Much like its predecessor, the pieces that comprise Traditional Music of Notional Species Vol. II are divided into two categories: themes and dances. While the line between them can be a bit blurry, the “dance” pieces tend to have a little bit more in the way of structure, such as the menacing and mechanized-sounding throb that relentlessly moves forward beneath the cacophonous skwonks and buzzes of “Dances VI.” Curiously, however, “Themes VII” boasts a weirdly staggering rhythm that feels more danceable than any of the designated dances. Such odd inconsistencies are inconsequential with an aesthetic as alien and abstract as this one though. 

(Un)naturally, the actual sounds are every bit as wrong-sounding and unnervingly organic as those of the first volume and similarly difficult to comprehend. For the most part, however, it sounds like this album is primarily the fruit of an inventively misused modular synthesizer, though Becker largely avoids anything that resembles a patch, pattern, melody, or chord. Instead, the surreal chorus of blurts and jabberings feels like a field recording that has been digitized and rendered quite sickly and weird. 

Granted, plenty of musicians have tried to conjure up the craziest and ugliest sounds imaginable, but Becker is truly on another level altogether, going far beyond the pale with his ambition, imagination, unwavering thematic commitment, and the visceral and crystalline clarity of his engineering. This is a vibrant and fully formed sound world like nothing else.

It is hard to choose a favorite piece, as the primary appeal of this album is that Becker basically dropped me in the middle of a seething, gibbering, and absolutely otherworldly miasma. Consequently, it feels somewhat silly to champion one vignette of squelching, belching, and squirming weirdness over another. Few albums are as audaciously and willfully inaccessible as this one, yet it is so boldly imaginative, richly textured, and disquietingly evocative that it is an endlessly fascinating rabbit hole to get lost in. 

Still, some of these bizarre fever dreams are admittedly more striking than others, such as the opening “Themes V” which slowly transforms a plinking and metallic percussive motif into an increasingly dense and gnarled eruption of elephantine swoops and growls. The aforementioned “Themes VII” is also quite memorable, resembling a mutant tango mingled with a chorus of gibbering wildlife and ugly, wobbly synth moans in the vein of Throbbing Gristle’s “Hamburger Lady.”

While this exactly the kind of album that I spend every year waiting for, it is certainly not going to be for everybody and I can accept that there are some perceivable flaws. I will not accept “deeply inaccessible and weird” as one of them, of course, but these eight pieces definitely feel like a kaleidoscopic and lysergic hall of mirrors that does not ever evolve in any sort of conventional compositional way. 

To my ears, however, any conspicuous traces of human intervention would completely ruin the vibrant and unnerving illusion that Becker has so painstakingly crafted. As far as I am concerned, his judgment was entirely unerring: he set out to make something completely unique, deranged, and alien-sounding and he succeeded beautifully. The end. And then he even had the good sense not to fuck it up by over-egging the pudding. If Chris Watson could make a field recording of squelching, gurgling, and slithering cosmic horror, it would probably sound an awful lot like this. Since he presumably cannot and will not do that anytime soon, Rashad Becker’s work is probably the closest thing we currently have to a disturbing glimpse through a rupture in the fabric of reality. Cherish it appropriately.

Listen here.

a2166849930_16

Rashad Becker, “Traditional Music of Notional Species, Vol. 1” (PAN, 2013)

,

Rashad Becker is a fairly revered and influential figure in experimental music circles due to his role as the resident mastering genius at Basic Channel’s Dubplates studio. That association is a bit deceptive here, as anyone expecting anything resembling dance music will be spectacularly wrong-footed by his debut release. Becker has taken abstract experimentalism into some very exotic, disorienting, and gloriously wrong territory. I do not think I will hear a stronger or more unique noise (or utterly uncategorizable) release this year.

The most immediately striking aspect of Traditional Music is that I have absolutely no idea how Becker got the completely unhinged sounds that populate these eight pieces. While there are a number of textures that seem like they potentially could have emerged from an abused and overprocessed modular synth, my best guess is that the album is almost entirely based on samples of field recordings that have been manipulated into unrecognizable oblivion.

While nominally divided into two suites, “Dances” and “Themes,” the overall feel is of being inside a menacing, unhealthy, and lysergically warped rainforest that sometimes seems to be in the midst of a catastrophic earthquake or volcano. That is to say: there is not a lot that could be construed as “music” per se (even by a purely notional species). Rather, Becker crafts a sonic menagerie of impossibly vibrant, creepily metallic-sounding, and violently pitch-shifting animal and insect noises. In fact, the rare non-animal noises that appear only serve to make Traditional Music even uglier, more visceral, and more disturbing, such as the clattering metal and horrible retching noises that embellish the crescendo of “Themes IV.”

While willfully deranged, brutally processed abstract music is certainly nothing new, Becker’s execution of it is quite peerless. All of Rashad’s disturbing sounds are delivered with pristine clarity and twine together to form an organically squirming and slithering tapestry of blurting and buzzing horror. Everything seems completely deliberate and each horrible sound is allowed all the space it needs to make its full unpleasant impact. Also, Becker never breaks his illusion with anything resembling a wrong or thematically inconsistent move, nor does he resort to using dense layering or “noise” to lend power to his mangled wildlife sounds. Instead, all of Traditional Music‘s formidable menace is earned the hard way: though the meticulously interwoven interactions of just a few textures mastered for maximum presence.

It could easily be argued that this is a weirdly perfect album, as any of Traditional Music‘s apparent faults are entirely dependent on the perspective of the listener. For example, anyone expecting anything resembling Basic Channel will probably find this absolutely unlistenable. Also, even those amenable to challenging and dissonant experimental music may not like that these eight pieces all sound very similar to one another or that they do not follow any kind of dynamically satisfying compositional trajectory. 

However, to critique this album for any of those reason is take issue with what Tradition Music is not, rather than what it is…and what it is is brilliant, visionary sound art. There are few moments scattered among these eight pieces where the “music” resembles anything created by a human: it actually feels far more probable that these are actual field recordings from hell, someone’s nightmares, or a very distant and horrible planet than the product of some German guy’s studio (even though I know better). It might not be pleasant, but Becker has unquestionably crafted something truly otherworldly with no clear precedent that I am aware of. That is a damn fine achievement indeed.

Listen here.