Octant

Strange gurgles and squelches populate the sonic landscape of Octant. Like yesterday’s vision of the future, Octant is a mechanised wonderland of familiar melody and alienating cacophony living peacefully side by side. This drum and keyboard duo features Tassany Zimmerman and Matthew Steinke (of Mocket and Satisfact) along with some mad scientist-type machines that will take us into the next century. The most intriguing of the machines has to be the automated drummer. Not a drum machine in the digital sense, Steinke has created a robot to play his acoustic drum kit. It’s difficult to imagine anything that’s simultaneously more regressive and future forward. The dark pop songs of Shock-No-Par live in a world of sensory overload, but an overload of samples and analogue sounds we know. As a surrogate to the visual aspects of Octant’s performances, the CD comes with two surreal stop-action videos populated by car-driving baby heads and hard-wired bunnies.