EVOL - Wabbit Trax

  • Hypnotic—or irritating?—techno on Powell's label.
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  • EVOL is like one of those IDM bands from the '00s that coupled grandiose academic references with tongue-in-cheek titles. Members Roc Jiménez de Cisneros and Stephen Sharp have releases called Punani Rubberist and Proper Headshrinker, and refer to their style as "rave synthesis" and "computer music for hooligans." Their best-known gimmick includes pushing rave's hoover cliché to its limits. This impulse towards the absurd can either be interpreted as a way to downplay the potentially alienating effect of over-intellectualising music, or as the logical human response to things getting a little convoluted. Wabbit is EVOL's third EP on Powell's Diagonal label, and it comes with no other information beyond an abstract text about earwigs by the fiction writer Uel Aramchek. It's hard to follow, but the piece compares the urban legend of these tiny insects burrowing into the brain with music. The EP's three tracks, all titled "Wabbit Trax," are as irritating as they are hypnotic. Wobbly, repetitive synth lines bounce for 25 minutes, during which it's easy to miss when one track ends and another begins. A dirty square bassline thumps with a hardstyle groove that seems to turn itself inside out with every track change, but does so in a way that makes the differences hardly detectable. They're definitely there, but it takes concentration, which is hard with a record that takes the term "trance music" literally.
  • Tracklist
      01. Wabbit Trax 1 02. Wabbit Trax 2 03. Wabbit Trax 3
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