Portland-based project Boron has been twiddling knobs for close to a year, with his premier release Decrresscenndo, a quirky exhibition of analog synth squiggles and archaic samples sculpted via Juno 6 and Moog III-P. Ventures that once illustrated a dated idiosyncrasy in their robotic meters are led astray on Dan Nelson's follow-up Aria Statica: a stark, hollow channeling of mechanical exploits with an affinity closer to musique concréte.
The fold-out j-card of this release, adorned with arcane scientific data, alludes to the academic nature of Boron's aesthetics. Given this, Aria Statica's 12 individual pieces are much less 'songs' as they are exercises and studies. Dan Nelson's modular synth transmissions act as muffled, constant pulses, slowly expanding during hypnotic iterations. Antique murmurs are veiled beneath processed croaks and cyclical squaks. Access codes are fed into the mainframe as it ejects millions of sheets covered in abstruse digits.
Aria Statica is best observed as a unit-- an interconnected system of cogs whose rotations follow a unified cadence. Each excursion is of its own breed, with a title given to echo its sound-- "Rumble", "Garble", "Scramble". Those who value modern purveyors of synthesis-- Keith Fullerton Whitman, Pulse Emitter and the like-- may find Boron's dizzying sequences as eyebrow-raising. The confusion behind the circuitry is expressed by both the listener and the artist in this instance.
[Boron Bandcamp]
[Buy Aria Statica from Field Hymns]
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