To open up a new Clearance release is to assail oneself with stimuli. Colors, textures, contrasts; images, narratives, mysteries; relevance, irrelevance, everything in between. Old hat, maybe, to those of us trained by gas station screens and FYPs… but it’s also different to be confronted by the physicality of the information, the evidence that the items and ideas were assembled by actual hands rather than the algorithm, the possibility of there being some puzzle to solve, some answer to know. This futile human hope that we can figure it all out is what Zac Davis’s project is all about—in his own words, “when rhetoric is all we are force-fed, in the absence of proper logic we create new grammars which sort of act as a map for the nonexistent logic, which can’t be illustrated.” The “logic” of Life Hack is more intimate than The Seeds That Were Silent and less apocalyptic than Information Warfare, summed up from the get-go by the juxtaposition of a bright orange box of fabric softener sheets on a washed-out inkjet collage insert. Reach inside the bag to find some title pages, a sheet of handwritten prose, and a comprehensive list of favorite Dead shows. What a spread! As easy to get lost in it all as in the music itself, which you have to crack open the Bounce box to get at. Davis deploys his usual arsenal of crisscrossing frequencies and tape feedback at full tilt: layers constantly phase in and out, transmissions scramble for a place to land, garbled propaganda fights to convince. Much like his live sets, the material feels more like jams than compositions. We can hear knobs being turned, patches being activated, and the dial of a handheld radio—always a welcome presence, and here harnessed to great effect—being tuned. The electric clouds are agile enough to bend around much more obtuse elements, like the Dead song in the final track, which actually ends up seeping into the soundscape both sonically and conceptually. The airtight ziplock and secondary cardboard protective shell is crucial for preserving the fidelity of the most fried sounds in existence, so ask yourself before you open this can of worms… Do I really want to know?
Copies available via email (doublebindhotline@gmail.com), Discogs, and various record stores.
Noise Not Music 