Search - Decomposure :: Vertical Lines A

In Elmira, Ontario, the twenty-eighth day of October 2005 was another one of those anonymous days that seem to exist solely to fill out a week: comfortable but mundane, overcast and forgettable, just like every other brisk Canadian fall day. This unremarkable backdrop is where 'Vertical Lines A' takes root. With a stack of 60-minute cassettes and tape recorder in tow, Decomposure (spare time musician/art guy Caleb Mueller) followed his average day around to capture and preserve its unique sound signature that would otherwise have simply evaporated. Over the course of the year following that recorded day, he worked through a detailed process of digitally deconstructing each hour-long slur of sound into hundreds of individual clicks and thumps and pings. Then he built songs from them. Or song-ish things, anyway. The result is an eclectic, unrelenting collage with a sound almost completely removed from its nondescript origin: bright harmonic pop refracts through bristling drill'n'bass, handcrafted electrofunk bumps up against epic abstract glitch-hop, cavernous acoustic meditation shares a table with field recordings and jittery dancehall. Of course, shifting across genre lines this restlessly could just as easily disintegrate into unfocused mush, and it does. Or wait, no, Decomposure manages to patch the elements together by anchoring them to crisp, unvarnished vocals and the precise punctuation of his careful beat orchestration. While 2005's quietly acclaimed 'At Home and Unaffected' was marked by an uneasy oscillation between instrumental and vocal tracks, 'Vertical Lines A' marks Decomposure's first all-vocal effort, and he commits himself fully to it. While his previous albums certainly gathered lyrically from their surroundings and vented, they never reached levels as intimate or as sprawling as this: layers of song compete for space and bewildered paragraphs tumble out like leaves from each of the album's branches.