William Bowers’ ‘Post Modern’ is an aesthetic statement not in architecture or concept but like that of a font. Despite the silly mugger greeting us from his one-sheet photo, Bowers is really a little gentleman. A typesetter of sorts, he grafts aesthetic angles into musical matter like quotations in a novella. More important, Bowers lays claim only to the post *space* modern, meaning not really that well-worn epoch, but a general timeliness of coming after modernity struck. That’s all. Using a synthesizer he creates nine tracks in a polite 33 minutes. ‘Post Modern’ is like Sun Araw without the guitar ‘n’ irony, impassioned as Coil, and patient as Scanner. With a spirited wave from his hometown, the stuttering opener “Hello from Green Bay” offers nowhere in its looping bleats for Bowers to hide alter-interpretations, and this friendly posture carries into the more developed tracks to follow. “Art Nouveau” “Roman Arch”, and “Happy Wandering” are multi-part soundtracks of pure vibes, with the last a send-up to overground American rave culture and the Orbital in all of us, a bride stripped bare off her beats to the musical essence above. “Night Moves on Shallow Ground” establishes a rhythmic sequence as in OPN’s ‘Zones without People’, but develops a melody of greater richness in a condensation of feeling – quite contrary to Lopatin’s general exposition of everything but. Closer “Solaris” is a bleary trance sequence which gets dubbed-over & out by huge bass daubs over ashy oscillations, and which manages to omit all filmic connotation and simply pairs two existential mediums in an appropriately shallow infinity-pool of sound. 100 copies on pro CDs in full-press digipaks.
Haute Magie CD
$10
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