Swagger juice

Fains - Fains
Scissor Tail #3

"The pristine, posthuman pop phuture we now inhabit." Welcome to it! Simon Reynolds wrote that somewhere in Generation Ecstasy. I was sifting through a drawer full of notes—notes of the sticky and loose leaf and cocktail napkin variety. I dipped my hand inside this enormous mass of paper and arbitrarily fished around like a contestant playing Three Strikes on "The Price is Right" and then pulled out a random note. One read, "The Renaissance Faire, mead, Dave Berman, and being hung over. What do all these things have in common? They all involve me and you." Another simply read "swagger juice." Another featured the above quote from Reynolds.

I considered his words as I listened to Fains' self-titled cassette. It's electronica concerned with both the phuture and phormer times, electronic music that winks at Kraftwerk or Aphex Twin or Kid A-era Radiohead, computerized heart-songs that sound disjointed just as much as they sound fully formed.

The electronic melodies are comprised of either three sustained notes played over and over ("Bent Julep") or notes that have no business being linked together in such a manner ("Barrel and Pin"); on some tracks, one melody serves as the backbone to a song, while on others, melodies are married to one another with no regard for how harmonious they sound. The synthesizers are fat and elasticy, while the percussion often borders on the chaotic. And there are strange noises lurking in the deepest crevices, shit that reminded me of the spastic squeal from when you dialed into the Internet or the glitchy buzz from when agents took control of the simulated body of a human wired into the Matrix, and something that sounded like a ferret making ferret noises under a blanket.

My favorite track is "Floating World," which has what sounds like a koto, as well as moaning synths and reversed guitar parts. At one point, all of this aural loveliness was quickly swallowed up by abrasive noise—a neat reminder of how we can destroy the lovely thing we have created in 1/10th the time it took us to create that lovely thing.