Review: Savant “Artificial Dance”

08 Sep 2015 — Evelyn Malinowski

What makes abstract music beautiful? Take Savant's "Using Words," opening track from the Artificial Dance LP, out September 4th on RVNG Intl. The bright keys and guitar feedback strown throughout the song give the seven minute sonic wallpaper a sense of pleasant curiosity. If they were taken away, we'd be left with the darkly comical, Morricone-esque pieces of some kind melody. The pieces would equate to ongoing, gentle inquisition, but with a harder, more gutter punk exterior.

This likening may seem laughable when learning about the leader behind the work. Seattleite Kerry Leimer, long-time avantgardist and label runner, is hardly gutter punk. Highly intelligent, auteurist, rhythmic enthusiast is more like it, although Seattle always has but grunchy edge to it. In any case, Leimer's imprint, Palace of Lights, offers at least 168 full hours of soundtrack to your life. It could be private, ambient and abstract listening while at work in your cubicle, feeding a guilty pleasure for insane music in a world made of pretend sensibility. It is on POL's homepage that we learn that Artificial Dance is a re-edition from Savant's original, self-titled POL release, one briefer, shyer, less heady. A Period of Review is where RVNG first got involved with Leimer, and it differs from Artificial Dance in several ways, one being that there's a lot more tracks on the former release. Secondly, A Period of Review is a lot more muzak-y, melody-centric, and, well 1970s-feeling, whether it in its entirety is a product from that era or not. In the RVNG shop you can order a POL CD bundle which features three K.Leimer ambient releases and Marc Barreca's Tremble, an album which Textura says "takes mere seconds for it to swell into the robust form it will assume for its duration.... a word like organic is less applicable than geologic, given the immense tectonic force with which its material convulses."

Having said that, how does DJ Shadow's unique type of turntablism slip into the picture? "Indifference" is comprised mostly of shreds of steel guitar drone and intentionally-stale bass, plus big beats that march forth with a dialectical message. "The Neo-Realist" is all about the lyrical sample and its being relentlessly warped He shouts about Jesus, societal privilege, and wearing no mask, at which point the speakers - or shouter - sounds like David Byrne. If you listen to the track in headphones, you can hear the impressive and rather delicious amount of obscure frequency reached by happenstantial audio manipulation. There's also a myriad of well-employed pan pervading the entire album.

"Shadow In Deceit" is where Faith No More steps to take a little Caribbean holiday with us. Uplifting, shimmering guitar in whatever key that the guitarists from Broken Social Scene used a lot delivers a warm, wholesomely content smile upon our faces. The feisty down beat is slightly faster than the chimes and other percussive bits that are bouncing around inside this moving truck of an album, which may testify for the fact that contributing artists picked up instruments they do not possess fluency with, as per Leimer's vision, and that, moreover, may elucidate the album's pervasive feeling of curiosity: what is this thing, and why are people obsessed with it? Bang, strum, clap, boom.

When "Heart Of Stillness" begins, I realize that I could respond in both freeform and detail to every song on Artificial Dance, suffice to say that, apart from the (slightly lampooing) spirit of wonder and fascination, wildness is what really pervades the album. A pure yet manicured, improvistional, This Heat-like safari through the innards of a car tape player that saw its action only in the late 80s and earlier 90s. So, to return to our question from the offset, I believe the answer is tenacity: in order to keep the human experience mysterious, labyrinthal, and oftentimes maddening, it must continue to be interpreted as such, frenetically. Persistence inevitably leads to triumph, I believe.

Aritificial Dance has been remastered and is out on RVNG Intl. September 4th. You can snatch it here.