Toad Blinker by Sculpture
We tracked the signal emanating from the rotary emitter and ended up here...exploring the lab where biological parts are spliced with virally spawned digital mutations.
Toad Blinker is an incautiously assembled amalgam of mutated techno forms, analogue electronics, tape cuts and digital sampling, gleefully twisted psychedelia. It's a take on computerised music production that rejects tired badges of 'quality'. It's fast and cheap, unexplained, joyful, strange, it loves trash and mess and mistakes and too much energy, and revels in accidental collisions.
Sculpture aim to generate an energy greater than the sum of its constituent elements. Dan Hayhurst's music finds its ideal counterpart in Reuben Sutherland's animations. Like their previous Rotary Signal Emitter LP (Dekorder Records, 2010), Toad Blinker is a zoetropic picture disc designed to be filmed at 25fps with a high shutter speed.
During live performances, Sutherland DJs with home-made zoetrope picture discs, projecting looping fragments of surreal, kaleidoscopic imagery while Hayhurst feeds tape loops, lo-fi analogue electronics, and digital sequences to a ‘modular assembly’ comprising a battered reel to reel tape recorder, CD player, walkman, hardware sampler and FX units.
A: bonus level, conjugal bloom receptor, dispersal projection, data corporation, visceral protocol, glome organ
B: elk cloner, iterative deviation, toad blinker, e.m. slew percolator, corolla
Press for Rotary Signal Emitter:
It’d be a mistake to conclude from the vintage of their gear that Sculpture are pursuing a retro analogue agenda. Their purpose is to explore perceptual thresholds…Sculpture hover at these sensory junctures, invoking the cortical feedback mechanisms of the brain – The Wire
As with Nurse With Wound at their best, there is a manic energy and deranged sense of joy in these recordings (and indeed animations)…as if a hyperactive toddler had snatched the avant-garde and ran away with it, laughing uncontrollably. As a result, what could have been a dry and merely ‘interesting’ project turns out to be a hugely entertaining joyride – Freq
Like a kid armed with the Sonic Youth track “Providence” who then went out and bought a sampler instead of a guitar. Lots of tiny sounds moving forward and keeping you busy. Woozy samples at the wrong speed are always the quickest way to my busted, weird heart – Foxy Digitalis
A dose of lysergic hauntology patching pieces of Radiophonic tape music with freeform drumming, digitally mangled modular synth sounds and all manner of sample textures to pull off an album that sounds like Keith Fullerton Whitman jamming with Roj round at Bruno Spoerri’s place, or maybe People Like Us locked in a room with Black-to-Comm and a juicy bag of mushies – Boomkat
Adventurous DJs would know what to do with this curious record: spin two copies at any speed and make dozens of new connections - Vital Weekly
Tracklist
| 1. | Bonus Level | 3:02 |
| 2. | Conjugal Bloom Receptor | 1:55 |
| 3. | Dispersal Projection | 2:59 |
| 4. | Data Corporation | 4:12 |
| 5. | Visceral Protocol | 1:16 |
| 6. | Glome Organ | 5:07 |
| 7. | Elk Cloner | 5:47 |
| 8. | Iterative Deviation | 3:14 |
| 9. | Toad Blinker | 3:04 |
| 10. | E.M. Slew Percolator | 3:20 |
| 11. | Corolla | 1:43 |
