Available currently via Sturmundrugs, but I will soon have copies for sale also. Please note that I will not have international pricing for this because I would prefer if you are outside US or Canada that you purchase the album from the label direct.

So after dropping nine bones on this weird little guy via the wonderful WAGON, I received a second copy for review via Foxy Digitalis. I take this to be some kind of divine gesture intended to communicate a shuffling of priorities. Needless to say, I do not want to offend anyone, so I’m turning a critical ear to Clavioline Demo And Living Stereo now.

And what a charmer this CDR is! Derek Gedalecia hails from San Francisco and has apparently been doing this Boggle-related stuff for years (releases date back to 2005-06 era) and so by 2009 the guy is clearly no stranger to sound manipulation and synthesis.

The disc opens with the short track “Headache”, which yeah, is just that kind of thing that maybe you don’t wanna expose yourself to for more than a few minutes at a time. Weird rumbling synth tones steeped in red play against even weirder piano ramblings of the third kind. Cap your headache off with hardcore panning and you have enough motivation to pull the covers over your head and hide out. Next is “Huh”. Really, that is what I thought and then said when listening to this one. Looping synthesizer screams around an echo room, changing from green to yellow to red. Meanwhile crunchy rumblings hold everything together. This is like someone’s dream afternoon playing with all the cool gear that you can get your hands on. Some very eerie space is created in “Huh”.

The disc travels through other realms of electronic bliss and terror before landing in the epic final track, which I want to kind of think of as a ‘final destination’, a piece that the entire rest of the album was building up to. I don’t mean to understate the radness of the seven previous tracks, which are all stellar explorations in electronic music, but this final one is a real gem and perfectly placed at the end of this collection. This track, “Swiftwememe” begins as a lo-fi ‘presence’, in which maybe we are just in the room while Derek tunes up his machinery. But then shit starts happening—buzzing and rumbling begins to define the airspace between the performer and we the audience. Hissing gives way to chirping iterations of what, square waves? Heavily mangled tones, in any case. Finally things become too chaotic and spin out of control and we wind up in a dense cavern of low-end tones and muffled sounds happening somewhere in the distance. And then minutes later more noodling synth garbles blast through the wall and separate mangled sounds inhabit the right and left channels. Just a side-note: if you are not prone to seizure, I highly advise listening to this entire thing via headphones. Closing this track is some low-key eerie synth chunking coupled with seemingly random visitations by other voices. This 29 minutes might be some hardcore gear masturbation, but it also happens to be some of the most intense electronic music you will find.

Electronic music is always finding a new definition and Headboggle is no exception. These are some seriously bent tracks and you will be hard-pressed to find a theme (other than chaos itself), but with that in mind, imagine how new this album will sound every time you put it on. Perhaps that is the enigma of such an artist that will go by the name ‘Headboggle’. Get boggled!

This review was also published in Foxy Digitalis.