Luke Vibert : Chicago, Detroit, Redruth
Luke Vibert’s career continues on with the new album, Chicago, Detroit, Redruth. I say continues because it feels very much as if the music on Vibert’s new album propagates itself like an electromagnetic wave. Melodies build off of each other, interfere with the base rhythm to create new ones, and oscillate frequencies up and down and up and down and up and down, bringing me to a place called eternity, which is actually much more common than typically admitted. It is a place arrived upon when traveling along tunes like Vibert’s for any prolonged amount of time. As each tune cultivates itself in a rhythmic soil so rife with invention as Vibert’s, the winding beanstalk rhapsody runs itself upward, growing, growing, growing, way past any kingdom of any giant, growing, growing still, and as I’m riding along it as it grows to eternity, I ask myself, “Where the fuck is this thing going?”
When listening to Vibert’s music, it is a very silly question to ask, as if I could know a song’s end before I get there. It is also silly because there are so many ends, little melodic tendrils and tributaries that branch off the trunk of this beanstalk and grow out to some end, but when holding onto the fast growing trunk of any song, these ends disappear from my view too quickly to notice. Sometimes I find myself wondering if the beanstalk I’m on hasn’t already grown itself to some end, some other song since starting a long time ago and I didn’t even notice. That is the place called eternity that seems so commonplace on Vibert’s new album.
These songs do follow some particular patterns though. More than one song follows a very wave-like cadence in all of its melodies, the sounds reaching to high frequencies, then dipping low in droning sounds, and back up and down and up and down and up and down and up and down and…
With this sort of determinism in some of the songs, I could do more than listen, but observe the song like a scientist. I could see how certain melodies sounded high and low and places in between, contrast and compare, because, well, why not?
The standout track on Chicago, Detroit, Redruth is “Argument Fly.” All of the melodies in the song sort of corrode, melt into each other and putrify, one of the reasons why I thought the track was called “Rotting Flesh Bags” and not “Argument Fly.” Any sense of awareness about the song, any innocent thought of “I know what’s going on,” quickly rots into the mess that’s created in “Argument Fly,” and becomes mired in it all, thoughts unable to escape like a mammoth in tar pits.
Similar Albums:
Wagon Christ – Tally Ho!
Kid Loco – A Grand Love Story
Daedelus – Denies The Day’s Demise
Download at
