Review
he artists formerly known as Games (name change due to prospective legal issues with rapper The Game) really put the Jan Hammer down at the Shackelwell Arms in Dalston for the launch of their eagerly anticipated debut LP on Thursday night. The duo of Joel Ford and Dan Lopatin, who also record independently as Tigercity and Oneohtrix Point Never respectively, have been releasing glitched out, midi soaked swathes of 80’s-esque electro pop together for quite a while now on the Hippos in Tanks label. New album Channel Pressure, released on their own Software imprint (a subsidiary of Mexican Summer), takes the woozy hauntology of the Games That We Can Play EP and Heaven Can Wait mixtape into denser, tighter controlled territories via the neat deployment of Prefuse 73 on desk duties.
Set in the year 2082 when bands have been extinct for 70 years, Hollywood is run by robots and the music industry is controlled by a computer called System II, Channel Pressure follows retro obsessed teen Joey Rogers on his quest to recapture the midi reign of his forebears. After receiving a robo-administered beating he retires to his bedroom vowing never to venture outside again. The album cover depicts the moment his TV begins to direct him subliminally.
I think metallic tongues are firmly in digital cheeks here but the only thing that really matters is that it sounds fantastic. A late night summery success that feels as though it’s at once beamed from the future and also recently retrieved from a dusty archive like some kind of omnipresent audio quark. Every time you think Ford and Lopatin are going to leave you stranded in an experimental tundra sublime pop hooks loom in to view and drag you back to the dancefloor. Clocking in at only forty minutes long it speeds past like an animated Gernsbackian cityscape viewed from the passenger window of Sonny Crocket’s Testarossa. A ride well worth taking and it’ll be very interesting to see how much cross over appeal this experimental pop record can capture.
Thursday night saw the pair ploughing through the album in sequence whilst energetically chopping and screwing the tracks inside and out of each other in real time. After the extended build up of album openers Scumsoft and Channel Pressure the already familiar sound of lead single Emergency Room releases the valve; its Sufjan Stevens via Scritti Politi vocals swim comfortably through a multi-coloured sea of audio Lego blocks and appear to open the room up. Then we’re plunged into what seems like a super dense foliage of elastic bytes, as tracks disintegrate and re-form with brilliant abandon until the crack rock catchy chorus of Joey Rogers drags us into a clearing and folds beautifully into Dead Jammer. Before anyone can realise the aptly titled and almost anthemic dancefloor lament of World of Regrets is upon us and G’s Dream is tape looping us home.
All in all an excellent but all too brief trip to a disco on an off-world colony populated by replicants and their human entertainment operators. Wake up, time to die.
Photo credit: Nickie Divine (www.nickiephoto.com)
Channel Pressure is released today on Software. Stream the whole thing below.
