Jackson: Smash
JACKSON & HIS COMPUTER BAND
SMASH
WARP
Jackson Fourgeaud has swiftly become the great hope of dance music. The 26 year old Parisian was snapped up by WARP on the strength of early tracks like "Utopia" and "Radio Caca", (both included herein) as well as breathtaking remixes like that of M83's "Flowers". Jackson's music, in which minor-key disco symphonies are shredded until the tics and gasps resemble the output of the INA-GRM, is truly Disco Concrete in the least trivial manner one could imagine. Like the work of Delia and Gavin, whose Mini-moog spirals depict Persian Surgery Dervishes whirling in the Paradise Garage, Jackson looks to Disco (the broadest all-encompassing genre of all time) to house his catholic visions of 'musique sans frontieres'.
Hotly-tipped by everyone from Matthew Herbert and Matmos to Ricardo Villalobos and Trevor Jackson "Smash" weighs in with high expectations. The record isn't without it's awkward eccentricities. Created in atmosphere of deliberate artistic self-indulgence, as an exercise in baroque trans-generic opulence, one should be surprised more of Fourgeaud's "unmatchable elements" aren't incongruous. Only the spoken-word vocal provided by his four year old niece on "Oh Boy" is a creative mistake, leaden and uncomfortable as it is.
However the rest of the record is sheer divinity. For body-wracking four-dimensional funk and mandelbrot-whorl aural wig-out nothing whatsoever can compare to "Radio Caca", less a track than a confluence of statics. "Utopia" is a wreckage of Diva spasms, hearing it is akin to experiencing the centrifugal g-force of a high-velocity journey down the seven circular levels of Dante's hell, as though that was like the descent into a never-ending inner-urban car park, the steering-wheel locked hard right. Listening to the new single "Rock On", with it's stuttering rigid stop-start beats, straight after "Utopia", and later on the Glitter-band stomp of "Teen Beat Ocean", Jackson's rhythmic inventiveness is made plain. Just as the record is stock-full of the hardiest most nervous cut-ups so it is home to some exquisite sonic candy, the almost out-of-earshot, low-slung arpeggiated riff of "Arpeggio" and the reverse-logic melody of "TV Dogs" (both reminiscent of the jerks of an electric cable) are pure loveliness, as are the lolloping harmonies of "Tropical Metal".
Records as stylistically ambitious as "Smash" are rare, and when successful, like this record or Todd Rungdren's "A Wizard A True Star" they are giddying, intoxicating even. Moreover the abundance of musical ideas gives the satisfying impression that more such sonic feasts lie in store.