Percussionist Colin Blanton has spent the past decade quietly roaming the frontier of electronic music with a small rolodex of aliases. As Brin, he’s made textural ambient collages; as casualshrine, techno abstractions. His practice hinges on improvisation, resulting in blunt, expressive, and unpredictable work. Whether dabbling in calm, modulating drones or sizzling hypnagogia, all of his tracks brim with the manic intensity of an idea chanced upon through experimentation, then explored to its fullest extent before it collapses. On his latest album, Cost of Living, Blanton mints a new name, Rikki G. Godd, and a new direction, using a move to Chicago as catalyst for a suite of demented industrial jams that radiate incandescent fervor.
Cost of Living wastes no time launching into long runs of ear-splitting raygun blips and bitcrushed wails, scored with frantic percussion. As Rikki G. Godd, Blanton leans heavily on burnt, carbonized textures, relishing in the awkward angles at which their charred ends collide. Distortion is baked in at the atomic level; no sounds emerge without first passing through swathes of low-grit aural sandpaper. Take opener “Unholy Nest,” which quickly assembles a wobbling cairn of raw frequencies that tilt back and forth across the stereo field before collapsing into a throbbing mass of texture. “I Am Dead” augments its seasick pulse with low-bitrate whoops and chirps that sound like the death rattle of an ancient Casio sampler. The album is a continuous rollercoaster drop, descending into darker, less intuitive permutations of its core sound with each track.
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Rikki G. Godd’s output evokes power noise artists like Converter and Orphx, who lace their industrial beats with bursts of disintegrating static; this is most apparent on “Casket Knock,” whose syncopated, floor-quaking pulse comes the closest to straight homage. Blanton’s improvisational leanings wrench this aesthetic away from the realm of the programmatic, allowing his tracks to warp on a dime and filling them with plentiful rewinds, glitches, and abstract codas. That live-wire quality drapes Cost of Living in conspicuous tension, even in its calmest moments: “Diet Heaven,” a blown out, shuddering drone that tees up the album’s second half, stands as an eerie counterpart to its neighbors. In context, its relative stateliness turns threatening, like a hissing cobra; it seems only moments away from launching a deadly strike before it, instead, gently unravels. As it fades into the throttled modular groove of the title track, the return to form is almost a relief.
While it’s a fairly smooth ride throughout, Cost of Living falters at the last hurdle with closer “Tomb Work,” which sounds like a hasty recombination of elements from previous tracks—echoing delays, thick walls of analog fuzz, a meandering epilogue—and plays to diminishing returns. Its pat, readymade quality threatens to destabilize Godd’s shtick, which, while still nascent, doesn’t offer quite as much juice as Blanton tries to squeeze from it. Put another way, Cost of Living is effective at grabbing attention, but doesn’t always seem to know what to do under the spotlight. As Godd’s inaugural outing, it documents a style in progress, a clear product of its influences straining toward its own lane; on its own terms, the album is a workable experiment—a solid hypothesis that calls for further testing.
