A spin through the roster of the Orange Milk label — which Giant Claw's Keith Rankin co-founded alongside Seth Graham — reveals a carefully curated exercise in the wonderfully strange. The Rankin/Graham team, who might be better known as the hyper-kinetic genre meat grinder Cream Juice, champion what on the surface appear to be incoherent and intractable forms of musical expression. Extraterrestrial prog, robo-lounge, astral-projected pop and the non-genre known as vaporwave are all well-represented.
As Giant Claw, Keith Rankin is engaged solo, producing sonic bodies that are so dense they emit their own gravity. Atoms of sound are drawn toward Rankin's orbit, unable to escape his grasp. This is evident on Dark Web, in which the cyberspace of William Gibson's classic novel Neuromancer is re-imagined as a collage of R&B vocals, rapid-fire drum machine scree and a virtual orchestra synthesized from the bowels of an old PC running Windows 95. This music is rife with incongruence, yet somehow it works so very well. Infectious — almost viral — in nature, Dark Web is Rankin's most interesting work to date. It's like listening to R. Kelly and Kim Dotcom wrestling in a vat full of broken circuit boards.
(Noumenal Loom/Orange Milk)As Giant Claw, Keith Rankin is engaged solo, producing sonic bodies that are so dense they emit their own gravity. Atoms of sound are drawn toward Rankin's orbit, unable to escape his grasp. This is evident on Dark Web, in which the cyberspace of William Gibson's classic novel Neuromancer is re-imagined as a collage of R&B vocals, rapid-fire drum machine scree and a virtual orchestra synthesized from the bowels of an old PC running Windows 95. This music is rife with incongruence, yet somehow it works so very well. Infectious — almost viral — in nature, Dark Web is Rankin's most interesting work to date. It's like listening to R. Kelly and Kim Dotcom wrestling in a vat full of broken circuit boards.
