I’m excited to post my second album review, especially because I actually know the artist. I met the now Ohio-based composer Incentive when we both grad students living in Pittsburgh. While we didn’t get to know each other well enough to be considered friends, we each recognized a kindred spirit and so have kept in touch through Twitter over the years. Considering he has just released his first album as I have launched a music blog, it only makes sense to offer up a review. There’s no way for me to know how much of my experience is colored by my acquaintance with Incentive, so its possible you may have a very different relationship to his music. Still, here goes…
There’s not a lot of hope or joy in Circumscribed, but the album is, perhaps, all the more timely in its darkness. For the majority of its 65 minutes, the listener is treated to a skittering, anxious, and dark energy. Distorted voices circle in the distance, while the insistent beats and loops wrap spiked tendrils around you. The nearly 11 minute “Benzojam (21 Bars Mix),” slowly builds unease upon unease, feeling very like a musical reflection of the anxiety haunting many of us in this Trumpian dystopia of paranoia and sickening inevitability. The track give us some breathing space only in final 90 seconds, but ends with the deep rumble of some dark future coming our way, and shrill alarm signaling that our time may be up. “Belt Knot” opens with thick, distorted chords swirling like the choking smog and industrial noise of a bleak and heartless city, offering a swirling break of calm only return us to a shrill, metallic space that gets picked up and further expanded in the scratchy, alien landscape of “Chubbick.”
Track seven, “You Know I Would” brings with it a sense of anger and, just maybe, a sense of resistance and defiance. But this is quickly swallowed up by the somber “Deathwail,” clocking in at over nine minutes and full of angry ghost loops of noise that float about the piece like a pack of Dementors from the Harry Potter books. Incentive’s evocation of the Philip K. Dick character Horselover Fat as the title of track nine is an apt one, with Fat being both the lead character in Dick’s book VALIS—with its themes of paranoia and revelation and dictatorial government control—and a stand-in for Dick’s own hallucinatory experiences based, possibly, on either drug-use or schizophrenia.
The album ends with “So It Seems,” a song in which the beat is always on the verge of being swallowed up by the broad, distorted, slow march of chords that pulse and pulse until overcome themselves by a hollow, piercing note than winds itself around and down into a low valley of noise counterpoint to a sound reminiscent of slow breathing or the ocean moving in and out from the shore. This, in turn, is overcome by both buzzing noise and shrill discomfort.
This is not music you relax with or that will pump you up and make you want to dance. Rather, Circumscribed gives form to anxiety and fear, allowing your own such feelings a space to coalesce outside of you. When you are done listening, the sudden silence is sweeter for the experience because of the cathartic release brought about by the unrelenting music. A release that, hopefully, if only temporarily, exorcises the dread that dwells within your own anxious heart. This may not be a fun album, but, like a bitter tonic to help expectorate a sickness, it may be a medicinal one.
Incentive on Twitter
Incentive on Bandcamp
Circumscribed iTunes Link
Circumscribed Spotify Link