BT: This Binary Universe

[dewdrop_world]

I wrote this up for my blog, thought I would post here also (actually posting here first!). I was actually quite impressed with this album, a surprise since I've been less impressed stylistically with much of BT's earlier work. The new album is not entirely above reproach but a damn good listen nonetheless.

James

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Last week in the office, I bumped into a friend in the lunch room and she told me she had been to see BT's This Binary Universe at an area movie theater. I hadn't heard of the album, but was curious, so she brought me the CD to listen to over the weekend.

I haven't followed BT very closely since picking up his debut album, Ima, in 1996 (has it really been that long?). In the earlier album, I was completely blown away by the production and for the most part quite taken with the spirit of the music (I was much more into house at that time than I am at present). I had some misgivings about style, though: the occasional lapse of taste, the odd melody or harmony dripping with more cheese than a Geno's pizza. Chicagoans know what I'm talking about... I could forgive the oversights because on the whole the album sounds so phenomenal and it is so much fun to listen to that it doesn't matter much.

I could say much the same about This Binary Universe, although there is more of the good and quite a bit less of the bad. The sheer sound of the album is exquisite. I cannot emphasize this enough! Every sound is rich, full of presence, and the whole album is perfectly balanced. No sound is ever misplaced. BT's sense of pacing and form have improved over the years; in this album, nothing takes longer or shorter than it should. What's more, the music has heart, bearing a kind of gentleness and peace (with a touch of melancholic longing) that I find deeply appealing. Long stretches of the album are haunting in the same way that Global Communication's 1994 summa of 1990s chillout music, 76:14, is haunting. The harmonies, the tunes and the soundscapes echo in the mind and soul for days after listening.

As concept and technical accomplishment, the album is a hefty statement. BT's music is not avant-garde on the surface, and it would be easy to dismiss him as a talented consumer of expensive music software who is interested in no more technique than he needs to complete a track with the least fuss. That completely overlooks a drive to learn new techniques, to experiment, that is fully in evidence here. The album liner credits Dr. Richard Boulanger for introducing him to csound, the venerable (and formidable) software synthesizer whose learning curve is even steeper than SuperCollider's. Many artists use csound or SuperCollider for a few effects here and there that they can't obtain with more standard packages. Not too many would attempt a complete track of anything other than an extremely experimental style using only csound. But BT has done it, writing the entire opening track as a couple hundred pages of csound code. Csound is in effect throughout the album, mostly through custom beat mangling interfaces BT wrote himself to produce source data for csound. Many delicious effects come from applying these algorithms to non-percussive sounds.

I respect this a lot. When I discovered SuperCollider, it completely changed the way I think about making electronic music. It seems csound has similarly blown the lid off of BT's imagination and opened up creative possibilities for him that would be impractical to realize by more conventional means. My hat's off to him for taking the ball and running with it.

The album takes a conceptual leap forward with the accompanying DVD, which presents the music in its intended surround sound format and also teams up with video artists to create a hybrid genre several steps above the trippy graphics from cheesy 1990s raves. The music lends itself to plotting, at least in an abstract sense, and the visuals pick up on this, adding to the dramatic arc of the music. Even when abstract, the visuals are never arbitrary and always contribute. Having seen it on DVD, I wish I had known about the movie theater presentation, which must have been overwhelming.

That said, BT seems not to have shaken a general tendency toward genre-itis that plagues his first album as well. For an album as sophisticated and expressive as this, I would have liked to hear more blurring of genres and defiance of expectations. BT is obviously capable of it; Dynamic Symmetry, the first track to be written, spends most of its midsection applying digital cut and paste trickery to late-night cool jazz samples, which somehow avoids explicitly aping trip-hop or downtempo breakbeat mashups. It refers to those known entities, without being any of them. All too often on the album, though, the genres are like roadside billboards: "Spacey meditation 30 miles ahead," "Hollywood soundtrack rest stop, next exit," "Glitchy beats, next 2 miles," "Gas, food and rock instrumental on your left." Don't get me wrong -- every style he touches is expertly done -- but it's a bit disconcerting that music of such technical subtlety could be so blatant at times in its adherence to generic norms.

The final track, "Good Morning Kaia," is in some ways the worst offender. The approach to the climax is perfectly plotted, but nothing really distinguishes the music from a hundred other rock instrumentals. It's forgivable because the emotion seems sincere and could be seen to express a general human passion for life. But the video makes it clear that the track is a love letter to his baby girl, and somehow, this diminishes the emotion, restricts its scope. The film ends up being about BT and Kaia, not about fathers and daughters everywhere, which seems to me a missed opportunity.

None of these quibbles should be taken to deny, however, the power and expressiveness of the music, the sheer sonic pleasure of the execution (this in particular should not be underestimated!), and the ambition of the project. Many moments are unforgettable: the placid progress of the opening track; the impressionistic piano splashes that open "The Internal Locus" (is it sacrilegious to recall La Cathédrale Engloutie here?); the inexorable passacaglia of "See You On the Other Side." Very fine.

Overall, I think this album compares well to 76:14, and may even exceed it in some ways.