Decomposure

The next time you get into an argument about electronic music, make sure you’ve packed Taking Things Apart as one of your weapons of mass discussion. You’ve likely encountered one of these golden moments in time, forcing you to defend the merits of an entire genre that continually spawns new offshoots due to the growth of digital technology. Even electronic music fans are divided on this point, which has arguably enabled legions of bedroom recorders to recycle beats and transform them into their own flaccid combinations of clicks, hisses and buzzes. Caleb Mueller also appears to be disturbed at this trend, so the Vancouver musician decided to capture daily surroundings and process them through the digital blender on his full-length debut. Fans of Matmos’ A Chance to Cut Is a Chance to Cure will instantly warm to this release. But where the California duo turned the sounds of elective surgery into quirky and playful grooves, Decomposure attempts a similar vibe by capturing sounds from some of life’s less-expensive activities. Conversations, Scrabble matches and public transportation are a few of the sources used to create these imaginatively themed tracks. While field recordings have been around for decades, this release highlights the limitless possibilities that can occur during the sound manipulation process. Whether capturing the subtle ambience of headphones inserted through a microphone jack or generating glitch-y energy from a toy DJ playset, Decomposure highlights the laborious brilliance that can be created —or lost — by one simple click of a mouse button.