For all the emphasis on process, it hasn’t been made very transparent for listeners of the album. (That I know this much is thanks to Fell’s explanations during a recent Bandcamp listening party for the album.) And Fell himself seems to have played fast and loose with the rules: Although Psychic Resynthesis is based on the original piece’s collection of assigned “behaviors,” Fell recorded each artist separately and, disregarding assigned durations, simply collaged together the results in a way that sounded good to him. It’s a relief that he’s not dogmatic about his systems. Rather than insisting on an hours-long endurance test, he seems willing to let listeners off the hook: We just get to sit back and enjoy this bizarre, not entirely intentional soundscape.
And it is, truly, enjoyable. In its cryptic changes, tangled quasi-repetitions, and contrasts between the soft and the spiky, the piece has an odd effect. I find it impossible to listen to closely; invariably, my attention wanders. But get inside it, even for a spell, and you may feel like you’ve gone away for a while. Time dissolves; the conscious mind atomizes.
Another new recording, Fell’s Nite Closures EP, offers an entirely different experience. It’s the first release on a fledgling label with a wonderfully stone-faced name—the National Centre for Mark Fell Studies—which the artist has said will be reserved for his solo electronic music, mostly in EP form. The record’s five tracks are more in keeping with the bewildering beat-based music of records like his Gábor Lázár collaboration The Neurobiology of Moral Decision Making, cobbling together deep-house pads and footwork syncopations into wildly lurching behemoths that seem to defy the very laws of physics, with balletic grace.
“Nite Closures (extended dub)” begins with the glistening iridescent synths of Fell’s Sensate Focus era before contorting itself into a nine-minute barrage of seemingly non-repeating beats. “Nite Closures (version)” is even more frenetic, spinning Errorsmith-like rubber-band noises into a singeli-tempo maelstrom. The bulk of the record’s remaining tracks are nearly as disorienting; what I find particularly appealing are the strange, iridescent drones that hover in the background, glistening like oil slicks. Much like Autechre, Fell appears to be testing multiple limits at once: the speed of his beats, the possibilities of his tools, the ability of his listeners to make sense of what they’re hearing. Yet for all the obvious difficulty of his music, on a track like the shuddering “large modulos #3,” the beauty he conjures—awe-inspiring, breathtaking, incomprehensible—is undeniable.
