This tendency to either “take it back” or take it to a place that may or may not exist has been derided as hipster house, with more formal dance purveyors sometimes bristling at the rough edges of this music. Quite a bit of the 100% Silk stuff comes off this way, making music for an idealized space in hopes of birthing it into existence. The uneasy tension in tracks like “Night of Romance” and the aforementioned “Liquid Crystal Drink” seem poised on O’Keefe’s determination to create dance music for an idealized place, a dance floor that possibly only exists in his imagination. There’s a certain determination to the songs here you can picture the producer, headphones clamped on, willing these tracks into the realm of danceability. The wonderful bubbly “Trickle” also enforces the strong aquarian theme here. The album opens with “Intro/Parallel,” where a mostly unintelligible vocodered lament melts into muffled, surging kicks and acid drop keys, before giving way to the standout single, “Liquid Crystal Drink (Pour My Dream),” a song that’s seemingly underwater from the start and revels in testing the limits of heavy filters, like someone trying to see just how long they can have a conversation at the bottom of a pool. On Mother Rhythm Earth Memory, O’Keefe keeps a more-or-less similarly lateral modus operandi while interjecting some of his own into the proceedings through weirdo, close-talking vocal warbling reminiscent of Backstroke-era Matthew Dear or DJ Koze’s Koze Comes Around. While displaying some fingerprints of each, especially in strong textures and dense granularity, the initial Cuticle release was far more of a horizontal dance offering than what any of the three collaborators had previously been known for. Cuticle is ostensibly his project, the past material dating from a time when they all collaborated on some level, a time before Witscher and Ho departed the wonderfully weird climes of Iowa City. The first iteration of Cuticle, as present on last year’s 100% Silk release, Confectioner Beats, was composed of a trio of talented synth wayfarers, including Jeff Witscher (Rene Hell), Daren Ho (Driphouse), and Brendan O’Keefe (Nimby). The material displayed here on Mother Rhythm Earth Memory, Cuticle’s first long-player for Not Not Fun, is much like a reconstituted memory - familiar forms in an unresolvable, middling state of de/recomposition. The Dalí-meets- Saved by the Bell melting shapes - play, pause, and stop - recall for me waking on a particularly bleary-headed summer Saturday morning, the only thing to reorient me a bedside copy of Spider Man #35 and the loud bedspread. The greatest compliment I can pay to the cover of the new Cuticle LP is that it reminds me of my cousin’s bedspread circa the early 1990s.
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