Big Blood

***Big Blood, the intrepid voyagers into the outer reaches of hallucinatory noise-rock and eclectic freakadelia opt for a new path along the circuit board of creativity. Electric Voyeur was made by applying strict limitations using home-made electronic instruments and voice alone. The result is an album that is as trippy as it is devotional in its exquisite craftsmanship.

The glorious scent of solder and silicon wafts all over this music. Crafted over the course of ten years at the workbench and in the studio by Caleb Mulkerin and Colleen Kinsella, they were guided along the way by a slew of books on how to make homemade instruments. Key among those was Nicolas Collins Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking. Lucky for us listeners, all of that effort is here condensed into four-sides of exquisite vinyl.

Kinsella’s mesmeric voice is showcased in all its crystalline beauty over beds of lo-fi reverb laden electro gurgles and percolating rhythms as she chases shooting stars across glittering percussive patterns. The lyrics are as poetic and mysterious as the efforts they put into creating these machines of ring modulation, rhythm and distortion. Beats made of crushed bits and the swirl of sweeping oscillators all make for a momentous and lyrical slapdown.

This work appeared first in two digital versions. For the vinyl release on Psychic Sounds an EP of additional unreleased material titled Moonlight Again, has been added. It is exciting to hear these extra songs, now brought out under the night sky and exposed to the lunar light.

Big Blood’s is uncategorizable music and refreshing. Even so, I can’t help but thinking of the silicon lifeforms forged in the studio of Bebe and Louis Barron when they created the soundtrack to Forbidden Planet. Or of producer Joe Meek’s many field trips into avant-pop strangeness. The effort is reminiscent of material forged in the BBC Radiophonic Workshop but remains contemporary. It’s a rapture for fans of the process-oriented electronica of Matmos or the ritualistic glitch ambience of Nocturnal Emissions. Big Blood devotees will delight in this overture to the human voice, transistors, and transcendent electric vibrations.

This is music for deep listening in the deep time of Deep Maine.

—Justin Patrick Moore, author of The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Synthesis, and the Birth of Electronic Music