- "It is about death," a somber Tom Brokaw reports throughout this EP's opening track, a moody rework of Raphäel Sage and Relativ Yann's "Breaking Down." Sarah Goldfarb, the musical persona of a dude named Jean-Vince Luccini, soundtracks the chopped-up details of this story "about death" with the sort of dark pop and rumbling minimal he's dependably delivered over the past six years for Treibstoff and a clutch of other Cologne labels. The track thunders with leaden booms and tumbling bass lines, but some zero-gravity ambience and a plucky melody open the curtains to let a little light in. Laying the Brokaw samples thick, Goldfarb grafts on an unspecified dread, but the aggressive, brooding music doesn't need it, and the effect is more a distraction than an enhancement.
Worse off is "Billie Jean Vince," a black vortex of a track hopelessly marred by more of the same samples. A clever editing trick, Goldfarb splices the previous track's sensational news story with extracts from a commencement speech Brokaw delivered to the 2006 graduating class of Florida State University. In these small excerpts, Brokaw can be heard enumerating recent fads in lifestyle technology: MySpace, hi-def, PDAs. The music's unsettling low swoops, not to mention the regular reminders that "it is about death," cast all this in warning tones. Ultimately, though, listening to the formal voice ticking off brand names and jargon proves tiresome, and grossly undercuts the replay value of another decent track.
As much as I'm turned off by these overbearing samples, though, I have to say that the one track protected from them, "The Circular Limit," strikes me as the one with the last personality. It keeps with the EP's spiraling tension and low-lit atmospherics, but this time there's not much that stays with me, save the match-strike percussion.
Tracklist A Breaking Down Remix
B1 Billie Jean Vince
B2 The Circular Limit