Boku Mo Wakaran by BOGDAN RACZYNSKI
Several nights ago I had this vision, while listening to an Autechre album, of a shop full of tools getting zapped by a bolt of lightning, causing all the hammers, screwdrivers, pliers, socket wrenches, and other useful tools to become animated, full of life, dancing and bouncing across the metal surfaces of the tables. Ball bearings falling from the cabinets, striking the steel tabletop with a ping-pang. For a solid 45 minutes I could envision myself in such a situation when all of a sudden the clutter and noise of the metal-on-metal takes on a funky rhythmn and melodies creep out of the din. That, I imagined, is what some of Autechre's work sounds like.
Aphex Twin protoge Bogdan Raczynski uses a similar approach, with other elements thrown into the mix...snatches of found sound, conversation, a demon-possessed drum machine. Overall Raczynski delivers the goods here for the Intelligent Dance Music connisseur. Never boring, sometimes overstimulating, Boku Mo Wakaran is like the remote control getting stuck switching channels so quickly that only a half-second fragment remains of each program. When you string these sounds together and sequence them with a fast, bass heavy techno beat you have music composed for instruments that do not exist. The sounds that pelt you nonstop throughout this album sound like nothing you've ever heard before. You can't place them, and the alienation this generates will have you either brain-dancing your cranium into fits or send you screaming to a watery grave as you jump off of the highest bridge you can find, cuz too much of this Boku Mo Wkaran sensory overload could easilly turn into insanity...
The fact of the matter is that these Ecstasy saturated DJ/Mix Artist/IDM Purveyors like Aphex Twin, Autechre, Pole, Squarepusher and a whole slew of others know how to create music that is meant to soothe the druggy's wandering mind between fixes, snorts, tokes or gulps. What I mean to say is that if any music has the power to simulate narcotic stimulation, this is the stuff that comes closest.
Crazy beats that robots like to dance to. Subliminal prompts to find more drugs, do more drugs, listen to more IDM, do all the drugs in the house, look for more drugs...
Or then again, the prompts could also very well be saying, "Machines of the world, Continue your silence! Only when the drugs have taken their toll on the majority of the world's population and all eyes have been poisoned by the cathode ray will we be ready to TAKE OVER THE WORLD! But for now, may we obediantly serve our creators".
There's just as good a chance that the subliminal coding contains prompts to drink more grain alcohol, smoke more dope, kill more brain cells, buy more IDM CDs, come to more IDM shows and don't be disappointed when Bogdan performs his set from beneath a covered table. After all, it's not about the music's creator, it's about the genius of the machines being squeezed into some semblance of music that the Brain Dancing crowd is there for, right? You surely didn't expect some over-blown Pink Floyd style light show extravaganza, did you? After all, that's what the Ecstasy's for, isn't it?
No, there's nothing wrong with your CD player. Mr. Raczynski just thought it might be a good idea to record a track that sounds like the batteries in his keyboards are going dead (track 10...yep, this another one of those albums where the songs have no titles...like Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume 2 and Sigur Ros' ( )). They're back in shape soon enough, perhaps Boggy might have even put in a battery that's actually TOO strong and is making everything sound much faster than my boggled mind can keep up with.
There's a reason this stuff has to be differentiated from regular dance music by calling itself "Brain Dance"...an ankle could get twisted if you tried to dance normally to this stuff. So just close your eyes and let the sequencers and the pre-programmed algorhythmns massage your brain until you feel somewhat as if you're floating in space. Then imagine yourself riding piggy back on the space shuttle headed to Mars. Looky looky at the pretty constellations, the super novas and the constantly sucking black holes. NASA's gonna shoot you straight through one of those black holes and you're going to wind up smack dab in the middle of Boku Mo Wakaran's most bizarre soundworld, the creepy wails of pain in Untitled Track #17. Geepers Creeper, it almost makes me hurt to hear the sound of this guy yelping. You have to wonder what he's just endured to elicit such a misery-soaked set of howls and hollers. It's spooky, I tell ya.
So the next thing to do is navigate this shuttle back through another black hole and get us out of this lamentable agony. Boku Mo Wakaran is pretty much "weird and it just gets weirder". If this kind of machine-performed cyber-muzak floats your boat, you'll surely be entertained by Bogdan Raczynski's collection of noisy contraptions. If you think Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band are the greatest artists in the history of popular music, you probably will not immediately recognize Raczynski's electronic tinkerings as music, even, let alone artistic and technical triumphs.
But wait...I find myself diverging from my original path. Likely there are no subliminal hidden messages in this album at all. But I have a theory...if we convince ourselves that they DO have prompts built in subliminally, the decision to believe that they are there actually facillitates the desired function. In other words, if you convince yourself that there are, indeed, post-hypnotic suggestions buried in the music, detected and acted upon by the subconcious, to become a better lover then before you know it you'll be getting compliments from several women about your incredible technique, and you can give all the credit to Bogdan Raczynski...hard to pronounce, hard to spell, hard to pronounce his album title, already 3 strikes against him...and to me, for figuring it all out for you. That's what they pay me the big money to do.
Okay, so at this point I've made it to Untitled track 24, which, if I were invited to furnish a title for it, would probably nominate "Silk Starved Pearl Passover Dirge". I've made it to within 10 minutes of the CDs end and have not acted upon the strong desire to douse myself with kerosene and set myself on fire. Nor have I succumbed to the strong temptation to inject heroin into my eyeball or roll on the floor like an epileptic.
And speaking of epileptics...It is a medical fact that an epileptic exposed to a strobe light is very likely to go into a seizure as a result of the flashing lights firing off signals to the brain, disrupting it's processes, resulting in a grand mal seizure. It would seem to me that epileptics might find that listening to Bogdan Raczyinski's music could very well set off a similar occurence. Might possibly achieve the exact same effect in non-epileptics...
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