Spastic Colon – “Post-Expusion Euphoria”

Despite the scat-tastic band name and title, this record is neither spastic nor particularly colonic. It sounds clean and airtight, like the inside of a futuristic car, gliding through a city, any city, at 3 o’clock in the morning. It’s the sensation you get when you’re out late, there’s not a soul for miles around, and you allow yourself the delusion that you kind of own the whole area. Who is there to tell you otherwise? If a city is giving off waves of urban sheen or decay, and nobody else is around to appreciate it, doesn’t it belong to you?

Through a small palette of electronic hums, thumps, and unfamiliar beeping noises that sound like they’re coming from something complicated (and possibly malfunctioning), Spastic Colon show the outside world as held at arm’s distance by a hermetically-sealed door, observed through unblemished glass.

I don’t really care if this was recorded, edited, shaped, and allowed to cool under a blanket, or whether it was just one LUCKY improvisation, it is perfectly formed. Piles and piles of “micro-sound” and “dark ambient” CDrs wilt and grow brittle in this track’s presence, because it achieves the one thing they cannot – it gives off the impression of having a beginning, middle, and end while staying the same throughout. Pretty early on, you stop imagining two guys pushing buttons, and are swept into a detailed landscape with a real sense of time, distance and location. This takes it out of the realm of someone like Joe Colley, who squelches all such narrative fantasies with his self-referential sense of editing, but the two projects aren’t a million miles away otherwise.

Only our first stop on a 20-station tour, and it’s already looking like this one will be tough to beat!