Rashad Becker - the incident
Notions of concealment, subterfuge and confusion hang in the fog around rashad becker's third full-length. A labyrinthine, narrative-driven "pseudo musical", it's divided into four distinct acts that puncture some of the assumed truths of the information age, using comical sonic touches and startling, idiosyncratic abstractions to reflect the era's flustering absurdity.
the incident is a sonic storyboard which keeps its subject void and is rooted in notions of clandestinity, of simulacrum and representation replacing reality.
Here, those notions are burned into dense vapors that help both illustrate and obscure a surreal, open-ended narrative that offers more questions than answers.
The first part of the album, titled 'let the record show', sketches the end of the information age, as we stumble into an era of mutual corroboration. Fanciful, intense and anxious, these four tracks assemble a dizzy landscape of lopsided, plasticky rhythms and gooey, oddly-tuned electro-acoustic blips and wails.
Just as we witnessed on the Berlin-based engineer's last two albums, Traditional Music of Notional Species Vol I+II, becker is able to develop uneasy soundscapes that tread a precarious path between the serious and the ludicrous. Never stiflingly sombre, the music oozes through genre and history, refusing to keep its story completely coherent.
'the currency of an urgent moment' meanwhile, the album's second act, observes this data deluge from four different vantage points, each with the same title ('zero hour') in a different language: English, French, German and Arabic. Understanding how both language and place informs our understanding, becker takes radically different approaches to each track; 'zero hour' is dense, overpowering and dramatic, 'stunde null' is whimsical and cosmic, and 'sāʿatu alṣṣufri' ornate, charged and entrenched in traditional musics.
becker surrenders to the state of amplified apathy during the third act, 'repercussions'.
Described as a "comical exorcism", the two tracks skewer lackluster contemporary ritual musics, representing this crisis stage with gummy metallic clangs and ratcheting rhythms that sound as much like a factory floor as a place of worship.
And on the generous, side-long final composition, 'what really happened', becker sets the story straight with "a docu-fiction piece by the multitude" that details the whole string of events. Brassy and sinewy, it's a celebration of becker's sculpted sound design techniques that unfolds like cinema, smudging alarm-like oscillations into precarious synthetic squeals and drones, and urgent blasts of white noise. It wonders what might be happening behind the curtain of news and hearsay, suggesting that the truth might be just as outlandish as its distortions.
the incident is congested but permeable, nervous and humorous - its contradictions are the fulcrum it balances on, and it constantly tips one way and another until disorientation is guaranteed.
