Any introduction to this/these enigmatic music creator(s’) work should come with a ‘Scary Door’ style disclaimer; it’s constructs are familiar, but its arrangement and presentation is a little less so. These beats occupy a largely unique space somewhere between the grindhouse-style production of San Diegonites like The Gaslamp Killer and Beatsmith Resist, Check Your Head –era Beasties, and, at times, what diegetic music in Sci-Fi films should sound like. Regarding the latter, if, like me, you’ve ever asked why it’s always f’*@#ing trance, The Time Of Renewal, and indeed much of what I’ve heard from PSY/OPSogist, follows a trajectory into the future-sound, when they go there, based on more intuitive variables.
The timbre of the drum work on this album is often aggressive, and at these times there is usually little to temper it. In fact, the accompanying instrumentation either acts to fuel the pounding locomotion of the percussion, or flails in the reverberation of each hit. It’s industrial and coarse, so much so that when a flute materialises somewhere in ‘The Cylindrical Sea’ you’re not sure whether you want to swat it away or marvel at it like some harmonious sprite.
Where the album mellows in between there are often vocal sound-bites which are philosophical, or straight-perplexing in nature. You may find these enhance the listening experience, offer a loose narrative, or get in the way. Whatever your stance, you’ll be scratching your head as to whether the source material is that half-remembered flick you caught semi-consciously in the small hours of the morning many years ago.
It’s dense and concentrated nature might make The Time Of Renewal something that you listen to sparingly, rather than on loop. Listeners such as myself who are still in the early stages of discovering PSY/OPSogist’s catalogue will find it to be a well-crafted exploration into their sound and sentiments, and by the time the monotonous alarm-drones permeate the outro, you’ll be wondering whether the whole thing had something to do with that King Willie sounding guy’s musings earlier on.
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