On his full-length CD debut as Robert Fuchs, Dean Fazzino summons his most minimal apparitions yet. The newly Queens-based artist’s best-known alias has gathered a substantial following from the strength of several tapes on New Forces, White Centipede, and his own in-house imprint, but the change in format for this digipak release on Usagi represents a similar development as Dogmono in that it marks a new high point for the project. The separation between the Fuchs and Spate material has always been somewhat clear—albeit muddied by loud, screeching live performances as the former that sound more like the latter—but never this pronounced. Where Spate has expanded into harsher and more complex realms, C.O.T.H. documents a burrowing inward, a descent into somewhere grey and shadowed. These seven tracks feel both assured and experimental, purposeful with regard to the approach taken but mercurial in terms of the directions they go. “A Number of Two Figures” is a mission statement of sorts, narrowing the focus to the haunted interiors of a motley electronics system. The familiar electromagnetic hum is agitated, shifted, and transformed by a series of discrete actions, shuffling steps along a path toward an elusive equilibrium point that’s never quite reached. Built-up tension discharges in the noisy seethe of “Small Molecule” and further decomposes into the spectral “Allele.” Fazzino’s work as Fuchs is memorable not just in itself, but also because of the range of reactions it elicits, and C.O.T.H. is no exception; a friend called it “almost… incidental, like it would exist without human intervention or observation,” while the website description muses that it is “restrained, somnambulant and perhaps even heartfelt.” “Pure” is a descriptor most agree on, though: this is abstract sound stripped of all context and pretension, neither cold nor warm, or maybe both. Ghost in the machine music.
Noise Not Music 