T C F - 415C47197F78E8...

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  • "There's a system built around T C F," Lars Holdhus has said of his musical project. "It's not like I composed a track because I feel like that this day. It's more like it's needed for the system to function." The nature of that system is anybody's guess. Holdhus's titles offer no further clues: here, as elsewhere in his discography, they're an unintelligible "cyphertext" of letters and numbers, an eye-boggling barcode that can't be easily remembered or referenced in conversation. Accordingly, Holdhus seems to want his music to be treated as a cryptic stream of data: vast, ambiguous, unknowable. If so, he's fudging things slightly, and he surely knows it. A recent mix from the Berlin-based Norwegian hinged on a couple of gorgeously romantic Ennio Morricone tracks, breaking like great barnacled whales through the digital surf. Likewise, his Liberation Technologies debut is at its best when it displays a knack for oh-so-human drama, particularly in the grand, turbulent opener. That track's melodramatic bent and spiralling trance synths recall parts of M.E.S.H.'s Scythians EP; the Janus affiliate is probably Holdhus' most obvious contemporary, besides Arca. But this EP's combination of glacial ambience and rumbling digital disturbance equally recalls an earlier generation of computer music explorers, namely Raster-Noton. The comparison isn't entirely favourable. Where Alva Noto and co specialised in breathtaking sonic clarity, Holdhus's compositions—while gorgeous—often feel a tad clogged, their surfaces dulled through application of low-calibre pitchshifting and other extreme processing. Then again, perhaps that's the point. Holdhus reflects his times, and in the 2010s the romantic image of the maverick musician-scientist in his hi-tech lab has been replaced by that of the hacker or pirate, cobbling stuff together with freeware and cracked software before launching it into the web. It's an aesthetic of expedience as much as artistry, which isn't to denigrate it at all. Holdhus' vinyl debut is absorbing and in places deeply affecting, even if its ultimate purpose remains buried beneath lines of code.
  • Tracklist
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