Diagram Of Suburban Chaos - Status Negatives
(Imputor)
8/10 Stars
Goes well with: Autechre, Boards of Canada, Speedy J
With godspeed is exactly how Diagram of Suburban Chaos (Mom-given, William Collin Snavely) recently fled San Diego for anywhere with culture, like other electronica promises before him (Kid-606, Plastiq Phantom, Lesser).
His debut, Status Negatives, will make us mourn the loss: intelligent dance music (IDM) that also stimulates the nubile, rhythmic part of the human body that rests somewhere between the heart and the bootie. The tracks' titles are Cobalt geek abbreviations, like "fr-ctred" and "fn-tonal." He's a real ee cummings for the post-world, which fits the fr-ctred beats that lie beneath his fn-tonal understanding of how to make a synth sound god-like and epic.
"Mental Wound" starts with celestial space whale transmissions over warm bass bleats and percussive white noise, and that's essentially the album's melancholy m.o. - classical synth over Autechre-like scatter beats.
It's truly, truly good. Sadly, those broken transmissions of human voices on "cryhsat"? It's DOSC on shortwave from Seattle: "the rain sucks, but at least there's cl-ture."
- Troy Johnson