- Computer Club is an offshoot of Central Processing Unit, a Sheffield label that has turned out excellent electro records from DMX Krew, Morphology and others. Computer Club is more varied with its music and visuals. The catalogue numbers eschew CPU's binary index, while the music is more experimental and has appeared in various formats, including seven-inches and memory sticks. Computer Club's latest release, from Thom Barnett, AKA Aesthete, extends its scope to the dance floor in a similar vein. "Too Keen" rides a brutal Euclidean rhythm made of several drum patterns, which occasionally align as they move at their own speeds.
The rest of Obfuscation shares "Too Keen"'s skinny, asymmetric rhythms. The tracks seem to admire the strangeness of early Jam City and SOPHIE from a distance, but their execution is more clinical. Because Barnett's music is so economical, it occasionally feels too rigid. The most sterile is "Plug One," a stuttered techno track with glitchy bursts of digital noise and water drop FX. "Igloo" does better thanks to a wider dynamic field, which makes the sounds pop in the high midrange and supplies a little more precious space. Barnett works mostly with pointillist beats, and aside from "Zaire," a quasi-musical collage of bass notes and synthetic bits, Obfuscation is short on variation.
TracklistA1 Too Keen
A2 Zaire
B1 Plug One
B2 Igloo