Basic House - Pathetique

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  • Like much of the output on V I S, Basic House's Pathetique sounds like it crept from an acrid sewer. Yet it has a textural complexity that transcends its aesthetic. There's no colour, and it sounds like the shifting of tiny grains and broken objects in a windswept landscape. The malfunctioning electronics are reduced to emitting tremors, barking squalls and subsonic hum. There's a strong sense of space, as if the recordings were re-amped into dank caverns ("A Cat With A Throat") or an empty living room ("Calc"). Other passages seem to set up shop in your own skull, like someone's scraping a coarse object against your eardrum ("Towers Of Simple"). "Still Life," however, drops you out at sea. Basic House translated a shipping forecast into MIDI to program the piece, which brings to mind an abandoned freighter emerging through a thick mist. "A Cat With A Throat" feels like an electronic approximation of The Labyrinth Scored For 11 Different Cats, with its jugular grumbles. Basic House has mined this vein for years, but Pathetique conjures illusions that are more vivid than its bleak palette suggests.
  • Tracklist
      A1 Double XP A2 Season Pass 4 D-Nest A3 A Cat With A Throat B1 Calc B2 Towers Of Simple B3 Still Life
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