Mind Controls The Flood
Released late 2011 by Public Information
A1 Flood III
A2 Bright And Blue
A3 Mechanically Replayed
A4 C. Bryan (Magnitizdat)
B1 Ted & Monty
B2 Form Constant Flood
B3 Less Or Maybe Even Much More
Fun Fact no. 1: Mechanically Replayed interpolates
both
Joy Division and Chicago's Lil' Louis.
Fun Fact no. 2: C. Bryan is a lightly processed live
recording of 3x3is9. After this EP was released it was
discovered that 3x3is9's source material for this set was
a No UFO's piece.
OUT OF PRINT
-----------------
Matt Wuethrich, The Wire 332
Eclectic is the wrong way to describe the music that
Vancouver's Konrad Jandav makes as No UFO's. Yes,
there's a mix of instruments - keys, synths, guitars, drum
machines, pedals - and, yes, there's a spray of genres,
from Kraut and Kosmische to electro and beyond, but
Jandav's aesthetic is closer to that of the podcast and
its earlier incarnation, the mixtape. These forms are not
about how diverse the selection is, but about how
persuasive the theme is. Tracks can range over decades
and genres, but they must, however tenuously, be linked
by some connective tissue, be it historical, conceptual
or, more convincingly, personal.
Over seven tracks Jandav doesn't so much switch from
style to style as continuously rearrange a few
well-selected elements. Motoring groove boxes and
endlessly cycling keyboard melodies give way to muted
electro funk. Distorted guitar riffing runs into pulsing
sequencer phrases. Mumbled vocals with delay slapped
all over them sit alongside push-button edits and brief
passages of tape-saturated synth atmospherics. The
sound is foggy, the haze of home recording hanging
over the whole as if it were composed in an afternoon's
dream.
All this surreal, shifting ground would seem like mere
furniture-moving, however, if Jandav didn't have
something to tie it together. In this case, it's mechanized
rhythm. That awkward feeling of playing along with a
machine, of giving up control, is just enough to inject
tension into these sketched-out structures. But because
Jandav interprets this rhythmic ideal in various ways, he
rises above the genres he passes through, in the process
illuminating the past for us ever so slightly while pointing
towards his own idea of the future.
-----------------
Justin Farrar, Resident Advisor
With ties to both Warp and the British Library Sound
archive, the newly minted Public Information label has to
date dropped a pair of titles: ADR's Solitary Pursuits and,
now, Mind Controls the Flood from No UFO's, the alias
for Konrad Jandavs, a noisemaker based in Vancouver.
Though this is his debut on wax, the Spectrum Spools
imprint is scheduled to reissue the Soft Coast cassette,
self-released in 2010, in the immediate future. Mind
Controls the Flood, like Soft Coast, documents Jandav's
esoteric experiments in psychedelic synthesizer, Motorik
pulse, punk guitar squall and drum machine clatter.
Side A opens with the record's most forceful piece. Built
from roiling static and buzz-saw guitar, "Flood III" is
an indestructible nugget of electro rock falling squarely
between Chrome and Suicide. But check it: just as it hits
a stride its framework falls to the ground. A rudimentary
synth progression soon emerges ("Bright and Blue"), but
that, too, collapses after a brief stretch of repetition.
The flipside lacks a hard rocker akin to "Flood III," but
it's significantly more cracked as a whole. Grafted to all
manner of sonic hiccups and ill-fitting juxtapositions,
both "Ted & Monty" and "Form Constant Flood" revolve
around garbled, little loops that wouldn't sound out of
place as score fodder in some C-grade science fiction
flick from the early '80s. After them, a faint whiff of
serenity arrives with the closer "Less Or Maybe Even
Much More." It's a glowing ambient drone whose head-
scratching title is an apt encapsulation of this strange,
little platter.