Spectrum Spools
Kentucky soundsmith Robert Beatty has gotten around releasing records on esteemed underground labels NNA Tapes Arbor and Night People crafting splits with Rene Hell and all the while playing in psych-noise unit Hair Police. However Persuasive Barrier marks the debut LP for Spectrum Spools from his long-running Three Legged Race project.
Recorded over a five-year period the album continues with Beatty’s abstract approach to electroacoustic experimentation delivering a heady often disorienting mix of live instruments sad-sung vocal passages and fidgety synth exercises. The songs are loose slow-moving and more gritty than you’d think switching between myriad ideas yet somehow still keeping a central focus.
The album’s press release name-drops Japanese electronic innovator Haruomi Hosono (of YMO/Happy End fame) and it’s easy to hear why. Much like Hosono’s soundtrack work collected on Coincidental Music or his earlier Cochin Moon period Beatty embraces a fractured approach to electronic-minded songcraft injecting it with a playful sense of experimentation often not heard in electronic music’s current crop of “serious” musicians. It’s refreshing that Beatty is way beyond “pressing play” on some EDM-geared rig even when he stumbles onto some dubsteppy atmospheres on closer “Permethrin II.”
Still Persuasive Barrier does demand a certain degree of listener patience with latch-onto melodies and melodic payoffs being few and far between on this way-out-there sonic journey.