Spacelab / Kaleidomission

What is the upside of the enormous, assymetric supply-side proliferation of music when the audience is so small, cashless and uninvolved? Uninvolved in their commitment, their stamina, their devotion...rather than their endlessly fitful diversion to the next thing...and the next..and the next. The ancient obstacles to the mountain top of music production and dissemination from the pre-digital age of capital exchange have been vaporized like pixel rock. What does it mean to be an artist like Spacelab in the ruinous rubble of 2020? Where do they site themselves? What do they think they are doing? Do they know how many other Spacelabs there have been (seriously)? Do they have any desire to individuate themselves at all?

It is so early in their development (this is their debut) it almost feels intrusive hearing it even in this shrunken public sphere and it feels borderline indecent for a wizened old critic like me to have at it. It is gauche enough to make you blush but competent enough to be routine. It is spirited enough to refer to Can and Faust and foolish enough to be made pale by the very thought of the comparison. It is earnest and untutored in a way that could turn out alright one day...with requisite abandonment and endeavour and adventure and real experiment rather than approximations of vintage signs uprooted from a once-rich semilogical realm, now floating, aimless and thin and stripped of meaning and resonance. Perhaps, that is the point. 

We could blame the parents. We could blame their education. We could blame the internet and Vaporwave 3.0. But we won't. I could have written about a thousand other efforts of similar status. An artist I know has been speculating that the landlside of ambient/auratic music released this year is part of a terrified flight to comfort and is as bourgeois and regressive as easy listening was in the age of atomic anxiety. There is plenty that is comforting and pleasant here....nothing would make me turn it off or run from the room or trouble me or make me fathom its source. And there is enough evidence to show that Spacelab can get myopically close to the surface textures of (mostly ersatz vintage) electronic voices to suggest they could yet fall into future wells of sound and stay submerged for (much, much) longer and emerge as spectralist composers of unheard scope and color. Kaleiodomission's sequencing and framing are never pompous (the label's publicity puff less so) and the fragments are rightly fragments stitched, rather post-facto, into a clichéd narrative whole that says nothing yet says it all.