Victoria’s Paul van Trigt has quietly built a consistent body of work under the alias Mot over the past decade, but it’s only recently—with higher-profile appearances on Tribe, Flag Day, and now Throne Heap—that the project has become a familiar name. (Even if you haven’t heard his music, chances are you’ve seen his distinctive visual art adorning the covers of albums by bands or other noise purveyors hailing from BC and beyond.) This is his second full-length CD following last year’s Bruises, and it continues the trend of making full use of the format’s unique faculties to expand his palette. It’s also a fitting entry for the label; Victim joins a select few discs amidst a much larger catalog of cassette releases, a special subset defined by a particular level of clarity and ambition, the medium of magnetic tape given more space and self-conscious dimension by the increased fidelity. For van Trigt, it’s the halting sputter of handmade loops that get the spotlight, coiling up electric tension and springing into scorpion strikes. It all feels not just mechanical but insular, turning inward and foregrounding the basic circuits and currents that produce and/or amplify sound. The six tracks, lettered “A” through “F”, play like a well-paced suite, to the point that picking them out individually is moot. On a technical level, Victim puts on a clinic in the heights you can reach with a very limited setup, and on an affective one, those heights are invigorating despite their stripped-down origins. The moments when the orchestrated stumbles explode into white-hot blasts, or the spools slow into a blurred reverie, have kept me coming back to this one all month.
