Access To Arasaka - Orbitus

A new digital EP from the celebrated Access to Arasaka, naturally this time it's an even more varied outing than his previous album release from 2010, 'Void'. It's a curious thing to watch this act progress as it's done on a couple of levels. There are the casual listeners who gauge what he does strictly in terms of his full length work eg: 'Metax', 'Oppidian' and 'Void', all nice and tidily summed up. Consumed and then tucked away smugly... but somewhere between these opus', in the spaces not observed, there are these exquisitely precise morsels where one finds the meat of the matter. This is the seventh EP done by the band and it does not pick up from where 'Void' left off, no, this is a continuation of what was begun on 'Null' which also was from last year but was quite different from the record most checked out.

Access to Arasaka appears to save his most eclectic and abstract tracks for these abridged works which sneak out with little or no notice. Check out his website and you can hunt many of them down but be warned: it may sound like the same artist but he's switched on the overdrive setting. Take 'Orbitus' for example. On the face value of just it's name alone you'd expect interstellar themes to permeate it but more than anything it is the insidious nature of technological breakdown that I take away from the leisurely drop offs and bizarrely crafted, dare I say it: song structures. There's quite a bit of room to stretch out and drink in what's going on, the scope of this thing is incredibly vast. One's ears drift through the emptiness of a city in the early morning hours, flickering lights dancing off the panes of polarized glass between skyscrapers.

I know I'm in the minority here but Access to Arasaka are rapidly becoming the darker, unpredictable cousin of Autechre. Each new release is further and further away from what he has done in the past and a lot of it is actually less music than it is purely composed to define the surroundings and even provide counterpoint to the ambient backdrop you encounter in day to day life: the lull of traffic signals switching over when no one else can detect them, the echoing of rain off the quiet streets when the last of the suburban dwellers have lurched home. An entire microcosm is waiting to be discovered and somehow, uncannily, Access to Arasaka have given us a soundtrack for it.

The analogy of what this act do being comparable to a Russian doll is more than apt, there are layers upon layers, worlds within worlds. The patterns appear static at first listen but just sit still for a short while, quiet your mind... and these same stoic compositions begin to move, their talismans rise up to the surface and arrange themselves in a vaguely familiar fashion and yet at the same time you will be shown a bit more of the strangely inviting place this one man's mind occupies which you hadn't thought could be, ehem, accessed. Apr 24 2011