Phthalocyanine
Diagonal Bias’ debut album PHTHALOCYANINE allows us to wade deeply into the vibrant color, to immerse ourselves and be swept away, floating without the effort of swimming and splashing in a thickly layered current of sound gently carrying us for 60 minutes.
This tightly constructed electronica integrates beautifully a variety of rhythms and sound surprises reminding us that any combination of parts will work with the right transitions, and these are right on. The tracks demonstrate unrestricted movements between a variety of diverse, sometimes vaguely familiar musical layers, all contained and referenced among their own unique sounds: funk, electronic scratching and rapping, voice simulation, spatial expansion and contraction, hybrid drum and bass cadence, orchestral intermingling, to name a few, all put in place and held in place by volume, overlapping, and always a variety of essential beats.
For all its complexity, Diagonal Bias’ music is surprisingly mellow. It’s neither dark nor peachy keen, just rich, dense, and shows up spatially as if heard from a safe distance without hostile shifts and penetrating attacks - it’s easy complex listening.
The tracks feel both arbitrary and appropriately devised. Either way, they offer we listeners a point of origin, an entry for participating. Their language gives us opportunities to interject our own vague associations and expectations into his moving matrix of sound. As with most titles given instrumental music or nonobjective visual art, they lend a conceptual element which informs the experience of sound or sight by allowing us to anticipate and attempt to find places to insert ourselves. One track, “Beneath The City,” has a persistently heavy foundation supporting lighter layered ripples, a relationship suggesting strata. “Family Secrets” offers a consistency of soft bass beats occasionally disrupted by swellings of sound as if something is being revealed. “The Space Between Molecules” has an appropriate and prominent structure of vibrations in which ambient rising and falling passages intervene. Many, if not most of the works on the album have little audible connection to their titles which leaves listeners lacking any resolutions between their expectations and their musical experiences. Of course this doesn’t restrict participation. I waited for a boom which never happened in the track “Boom Boom Boom.”
PHTHALOCYANINE is an exciting journey in sound, one which continues to reveal previously unheard artistry with every listen, a musical adventure.
- Ben Dallas