Distraction

ILLUSION OF SAFETY Distraction CD Some may disagree with me here, but Distraction may very well be the best CD (or anything) IOS has released yet. A multi-faceted offering. Distraction is in essence, a culmination of all aspects of past releases... references being made to almost everything they've done (bits and pieces make brief appearances). What makes Distraction work so much better is that it offers no singular sound in which to describe or categorize it. From the quiet field recordings of "Con Ed" and the frantic beat assemblage of "Imposture" to the junky collage soundscapes of "Vasectomy" and the trademark drowning ambience of "Fragments of Memory" or "Helen Your Brain, Forever Since Breakfast". Distraction is chock full of concise edits, off-kilter manic energy and brilliant sampling. One need only listed to the "White Zone" with its unbelievably violent assemblage of piston-like beats to know this is no ordinary release. While it lacks the emotional drain of say Historical, it makes up for it in pure unbridled power and it's success at bringing together such a broad base of contradicting sounds. As a unit Distraction is intensely wound up, with Dan cathartically unleashing a slew of pent-up frustrations and tension into one 74-minute excursion of music. Holy ****, you need this! Odd Size. JM ILLUSION OF SAFETY Distraction. IoS has been charting their own distinctive course for some time now, and under many shadowy guises: they've instigated corrosive noise, industrial rhythm music, musique concrete and explored the wide contours of pure sound collage. The nucleus of the 'band' has always been multi-instrumentalist Dan Burke, although the lack of linear notes in the digipak fail to indicate whether others are involved. Distraction is an exercise in plundersonics--Burke travels throughout the electronic spectrum, as the single 63-track goes through warped, backwards classical motifs, marauding drum machines attempting invoke martial law, film samples, and all sorts of machine hums, feedback and indefinable noises. It's a stereophonic collage wrenched from the vast history of music and it's intertwined with electronic technology, with a vast amount of plucked, refined and reconfigured sounds. Thematically, it doesn't get into a cohesive whole, but this kind of stuff rarely does: like a cinematic documentary edited with a '90s hyper-brutality, the patient listener is rewarded by the sheer richness of the work's various component parts.