- Hypnotic noise experiments.
- David Wesley Sutton is most at home at electronic music's fringes. Over the last few years, the Philadelphia producer has focused on his LXV alias, coughing up a string of records, cassettes and mixes documenting his beat-based abstractions, which are colorfully alien structures built from ambient, modern classical and IDM. Yet even Alterations, released under his own name, feels like a decidedly unconventional release.
Its two longform compositions jettison any semblance of groove. "In Suspension Of The Other" is a cavernous squall, while "In The Dancing" is a drone that pours an impenetrable mixture of needling tones and subterranean resonances into your ear canals. But Alterations doesn't lack the meticulous craft of Sutton's more structured work as LXV. After all, both pieces, however abstruse, draw listeners in because they're so carefully synthesized.
In this regard, "In Suspension Of The Other" excels. At first, it's a chaotic, lo-fi collision of slashing radio frequencies, scrambled piano and synthesizer scraps and what sounds like severely warped tape echo. Eventually, though, those elements gel into a fluid pattern of ripples and waves that, while still profoundly disorienting, become hypnotic. Sutton demands a lot from his listeners, but traveling with him to the fringes can be transformative.
TracklistA In Suspension Of The Other
B In The Dancing