Dean Spunt's all-new Basic Editions is an excursion in electronic sound that instrumentally unpacks his fascination with language -- in this case, the syntax of systems and processes. By turns meditative, compulsive and consumptive, Basic Editions distills a 64-voice module through a headful of ideas -- somewhat like pouring a cornucopia of possible ambient moods and EZ listening impulses backwards through a funnel, inspiring a deceptively absurd rainbow of soul to spray out the other end. With this new release, Dean IDs his process as 'using sounds, rather than making sounds.' This approach to music-making is a train of thought that's been rolling out from the far horizon of the past for ages now -- but for Dean, whose previous works within and without No Age depended on their making of sounds, it's a fresh work stance. Basic Editions delivers further unexpected hard-rights and lefts in the non-aesthetic aesthetic that has defined Dean's path over the past two decades. Steering toward wacked digital soundscapes that bounce colorfully across the stereo azimuth, Dean creates a kind of post-ambient neo-exotica that hinges upon a giddy conflation of cosmic and comic. This 'urban dance synth' was made great use of in hip-hop productions around the turn of the millennium. There's lots more to know about the machines of that time -- choose your own rabbit hole -- but the takeaway here is that it generates a finite amount of very circa-2000 sounds and he got it for fifty bucks. Inspired, Dean spent a minute getting its basic capacities in hand, while acquiring a few other boxes with compatible cards (more sounds!). In one way of thinking, Basic Editions is the sound of Dean not being influenced by anything -- how could he be? The sounds were all preset! There is, however, an instinctiveness to pushing a closed system in a curatorial manner, and it's here that Dean's inclinations took the wheel of the proceedings, bending the farmed sounds in and out of color and shape, creating improbable constructions whose gears clash together and revolve with an odd combination of nerviness and chill. Further refinements are provided with the artwork, which reprocesses generic graphic information sourced from various modules, while the album title tips its cap to a fine rank-and-file clothing line offered at K-Mart.
