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bt - Emotional Technology 10/10
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| hooknife |
| BT has done it again! I just got the new album by BT and I’ll have to say it’s an instant classic. This album is perfect!! |
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| Dmatrox |
Sorry to dig up this old thread, but....
THIS ALBUM ROCKS!!!!
I just got it and its amazing, purely genious and well put together!
(im a year behind :D) |
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| Cobalt |
| Compared to ESCM or Movement In Still Live? Nuh-uh. Nowhere close. |
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| Dmatrox |
| heh, may be i should get those too ;) |
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| tc-fan |
IMO alot of stuff on this album is
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| starglider |
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| tranceDJ |
| 10/10? Nah, definetly not when you compare it to BT's earlier works. Check out 'Ima', 'ECSM', and 'Movement In Still Life'...now those are 10/10 albums. |
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| webmeister |
| He can't DJ for though :o |
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| sharpeye00 |
| quote: | Originally posted by starglider
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maybe i'm just getting old but i like bt's older stuff specifically "tripping the light fantastic" that was a marvelous piece of work. his new stuff is nice but nothing like the 'organic sound' type of music he use to do that i read about him sometime ago. |
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| Pointy |
| Hahahhahaha, this albums . BT succeeded in creating his boyband dream into real life :p |
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| Sand Leaper |
| quote: | Originally posted by webmeister
He can't DJ for though :o |
Then again he never said he could either. I remember he met up to his gig @ WMC in 2002 with a t-shirt that said "I'm not a DJ" :haha:
Let there BT
Well, here we go. Several people have repeatedly asked me to review BT's last album, 'Emotional Technology'. I tried to maintain that everything that needs to be said about BT has already been said but they simply wouldn't listen... A few of them pointed out that the one thing I haven't done yet is a serious review of his music. I caved in, weeping. A combined sense of terror and panic at the thought of giving him any more consideration has gripped me ever since. Something like this was going to require some very unpleasant effort - explaining things is never cool. This article is not fun, I promise. It was difficult and I'm glad it's over. It will, very thankfully, be the last time that I ever have to say anything about BT. Uninspiring confused music gives rise to cramped mediocre writing, I know that now... Blame BT for all of this. I have.
I'm asking nobody to read this review and I strongly encourage fans of BT's music and persona to stop reading now. It will probably bring you very little happiness and might forever remove a means of joy from the little gas tank of your hearts. Some of my critique is based loosely on the idea that the trivial and the marginal can sometimes possess genuine social importance. Music can be an act of inspiration. Within these acts there exists' the possibility of glimpsing through and perhaps even far past the cracks of banal repetition. Music should exist outside capitalist tactics as much as possible, not cradled, cuddled or birthed from within them.
I felt an almost moral imperative and personal social obligation to examine this body of work. Music is magical, or should be. In my search to discover what I love I find the way blocked or obscured here and there by hideous things masquerading as possible options. The American folk artist Woody Guthrie once said, 'There are two types of music, one to live to and one to die to'. By this standard I'm not sure what BT does even qualifies as music. Instead there's only the musical posture he assumes. When the posturing is stripped away from most music and musicians there is usually very little left, but occasionally what's left is profound. Posturing is part of the fun of music, it always has been. This is as true of dance as it is of rock, punk, soul and jazz. But I am trying to understand BT's poses and I am at a loss. What is it he's trying to project and is it working? I am left uncertain but still somehow repulsed by it all. I am tired of hearing what an 'Okay' guy BT is. I don't care. It sickens me to think that somebody might be spreading that kind of nonsense about me. Who would ever want to be called 'Okay'? Call me anything you can, BUT DO NOT EVER CALL ME 'OKAY'. This word is a type of lie that obscures all things good, medium and otherwise.
So, away we go... Okay?
This album contains no new territory, no new subject matter. It is funny but without its own sense of humor. I laughed openly at most of it in shocked disbelief. It makes and fulfils no promises. It is peppered with interesting sounds, but the elements rarely achieve a synergistic effect. He did litter almost every song with his singing, further evidence that his real aim, if it can be called that, is towards the sick limping heart of boy-pop stardom. The lyrics are poor and inconsequential and the songs cannot move past this, although the lyrics do seem occasionally sympathetic to his audience's concerns rendering them appropriate at times. Nothing really whispers here, unless, of course, it reminds you that it's whispering. There is no readily apparent story to this album beyond its pseudo-metaphysical themes and an adolescent yearning for love, at least until we consider subtext and motive. One might assume that, metaphorically, emotion and technology are disparate elements and through some secret musical alchemy Big Bri' has forever merged them for us, redefining the way we live our lives. But the universe remains thankfully unchanged. The track 'Circles' really stood out as an all out joke. It is very bad hair rock. He actually uses the word 'convolving' in this song. There is another similar word that might have helped him, 'convoluted'' On the next song, 'Last Moment of Clarity' he uses the word 'ubiquitous' in what feels like a never ending thesaurus chorus. This is some of the very worst songwriting ever and it seems never to stop, it is relentlessly awful. In the next song, 'Communicate' he urges us to learn to use words' A shocking concept but one that he seems to have embraced with typically misguided zeal. Out of shame I have already thrown the cd away. Fear, pride, etc.
Well, enough about the music, let's talk about the real issues.
The momentum of this album is ugly. It is insulting in its posed and meretricious beauty, speciousness' It is dull in acutely unpleasant ways. It should be hidden, concealed, etc. Rather than opening up boundless possibilities it seems to constrict the listener, erasing previously known freedoms and joys. BT attempts to be a centrality in which he offers the listener no real invitation in. It is very difficult to participate in this music, for me it is almost impossible. All music is self involved so this is not really a crime but there is a substantial difference between listening to BT and listening to any artist that is aware of their audience as being anything other than a 'target market'. There is nothing coded in the gloss. His image is pure occultic albino fashion.
One thinks of what must have been going through his mind when he was posing for the front cover picture... 'Is it possible for me to bring any more joy to my fans?' or 'Dear God, this suit looks good on me'. Or simply, 'Praise'. His apparent move towards televangelism comes as no real surprise with this in mind. He'll fit right in there and probably do very well. TeleVangelis, Yawni, etc. It is a pathetic message disguised as a factual fiction, similar to most modern Christianity as found on TV. This album projects a feeling of cult Christian terror. Jim Jones, etc.
BT poses as a kind of perverted visionary, a conduit for inspiration and youth guidance.
From the album artwork we might assume that BT is somehow peddling the empty insinuations of redemption. I'm not entirely sure if this is a misguided concept or none at all. This entire album is a form of pseudo-religious masturbation, the best thing he's ever done in that regard. Well, it's at least laughingly entertaining as a bizarre concept of conceit. It's a near relative of 'Tarkus' by Emerson, Lake and Palmer. I forget who it was but somebody referred to Keith Emerson as a waste of 'talent and electricity'. The comparison holds.
BT is lamely trying to project an image of singularity to the world. He 'has arrived' and in some bizarre way perhaps he is trying to invite us towards his musical utopia. This album cover says 'yes' so overtly in its aggressive capitalist nightmare that it immediately raises and excites my suspicions even beyond my natural proclivity of everything that emanates from this fraudulent phony. I had always thought that he moved to Hollywood to become a stunt musician. I was worried he might get injured if they ever decided to make the movie of Rod Stewart's life... 'Every Picture Sells a Story'. A bizarre accident involving several roles of film, two soccer teams, a crazed screaming director and a stomach pump.
Okay... the music.
These sounds are crowded. Most of them probably just wanted to be left alone, though some of them sound as if they have been left alone for just about ten years now. The same annoying synth sounds as his bad music from the not so distant past. They have been digitally bothered into agitation but still exist far from rage. The sounds are annoying but not angry. Big Bri' doesn't possess contempt -- he provokes it. There is not the feeling that 'anything can happen' on this album but rather that many things will happen and that is all. It lacks any hint of real possibility. It delivers the clich'd promise of genius without any of the pleasures and threats of oblivion. There is no 'Pandora's Box' to be opened here. It is almost altogether lacking in mysterious places that invite or let you in. The album comprises an incomplete fraud. It is a fetishistic love of digital processing and its army of marching plug-ins. It's a confused orchestra of calculations with each attempt embarrassing in only slightly different ways. The result is a stale homogenous blunder.
Most of all, this album lacks moments of profound silence. It also lacks moments of meaningful noise, but that is another thing altogether. In an interview he did in Remix magazine he compared his new track 'Dark Heart Dawning' to the album 'Spirit of Eden' by Talk Talk. One need only listen to these recordings back to back with headphones on at high volumes to realize the full weight of his indiscretion. His error is self-evident. He apes the piano riff from the 'American Beauty' soundtrack for this gem and even uses some genuine dj scratching. His cynical production values appropriately fit these times and will be appropriately forgotten or laughed at along with them. They cannot possibly either contain or measure up to their own ideology. As music it is 'art' but perhaps not for 'art's sake'. You get the feeling that it would not exist at all outside of its own economic impetus. Most of this music does not suggest definition -- it demands it. It has completely suppressed whatever ambiguities may have arisen while making it. In fact, in his liner notes, he actually brags about time correcting the sound of rain' This music is a false fact, concrete and stale. From the same interview in 'Remix' the only example he gives of how complex time correction is: simply that he's writing a book on it. Great example Bri'' Any other complex issues you'd like to tackle? BT: the true measure of complexity. Or is it just complexion?
His music tries so hard to be correct at times it renders itself uninteresting. This music does not writhe or howl or twitch, it is not hung-over, either giving into or recovering from an addiction, an obsession or a perversion. He's a musical Puritan, a Christian cop. The music suffers no readily apparent lacerations, diseases or infections. The music is sterile. It is not trapped in neurotic sexual frenzy. It chases nothing because it is disconnected from real desire and pathos. I wonder if BT were actually able to successfully incorporate moments of profound silence on this album what would they resonate with? Pithiness probably. But never an echoed taste of De Sade's pathos or mania. Well, this isn't really fair. He did the best he could...sadly. I'd prefer to hear an album of what HE believes to be his worst music, not what I believe to be his worst. Things that perhaps he deletes in the middle of the night out of shame, uncertainty or fear. Paranoid riffs. Can a riff be paranoid? I guess not. A riff is a type of certainty, usually overstated male bravado and little else. Paranoia is a form of fearful ignorance. Still there must be musical passages that have leapt from his subconscious without analysis' musical paradoxes, something' anything. Confusing things, etc. If he ever had the courage to pursue those emotions to their end, he might actually produce something of interest. Instead this music has bought into the clich' of its own imagined genius.
There is no true hint of either fear or desperation here. It is unchecked confidence, happy to be glad, but just as happy to be sad, in bouncing boy band fashion. There is nothing lurking in this album, it is not sexy. There is no true confused pleading here, the image and sound of certainty subsumes all doubt. It searches for satisfaction in pop resignation. Actually, that's giving it more credit than it deserves. It doesn't seem to search at all. There is only something that it barely maintains: a hyperactive boredom. It is a vacuous sound of neither exuberance nor exhaustion. Do genuine remorse, doubt and fear play no role in Big Bri's holiday utopia?
None of the desires on this album were ever buried so there is no struggle to make them known and give them a voice. It is the expression of lightly veiled financial dreams and wishes speaking a language of bland complicity. BT used to beg for his success, now he just assumes it. That this retail trick seems to be almost working for him puts popular culture on trial again. Guilty as charged. So we are forced to serve out another sentence ('Ten Years In The life', a prison sentence). To believe in any way that this album will be listened to in ten years is a condemnation of the world that I cannot entertain. Perhaps BT lacks the appropriate amount of leisure time to create music that will last. Genius often requires long periods of inactivity. If BT did less he might matter more.
Okay. What joy?
At the very heart of BT's lousiness, at the core of his failure we catch a perverse glimpse of an American dream. 'An American dream...' what the am I saying? As any fool knows we only have nightmares here, we chase them with a heart melting pace and sickening fervor. We are a nuclear people forever searching our center, losing electrons and whatever other particles may not be orbiting productively.... Ladies and Gentleman, Godzilla has left the sandbox. Beg the moaning mercies, what the am I talking about now? Anything to keep me from having to think much more about Big Bri's latest catastrophe...
For now all BT can see through the flashing stage lights' is the crowd smiling, he hasn't seen the stones in their hands yet...
It is music of true capitalist collusion. He's probably already struck a deal with the Bush regime team to provide Iraq with whatever candy-coated crap may be necessary to fill the airwaves in the new markets of Mesopotamia. 'The best limited sounds and sensations of Western musical freedom on your FM dial...' Is it liberty, freedom, or free demons? I forget. There is perhaps some terrible bizarre connection between BT and George Bush beyond both of them being Short Christian Cops. 'Cops for Christ'... Midget Jesus. They are perhaps symptoms of the same problem. I can picture BT doing the soundtrack for Bush's new military media program F.E.A.R. (Fast Early And Right). Always in FEAR... A new anti-everything, the same old pro-us. FEAR U.S. We will the world to death in sexless struggle. The true rage of political impotence and cultural rape.
The image on the cover suggests that of a nearly genderless religious pervert soon to be soliciting young boys in the name of Christ. Cops have to pay for boys but the priests are given 'donations'. This is truly the world we live in. I think he should be taxed into starvation. Now that might more closely resemble the 'new justice'. Ah... when I become dictator of the recently acquired eastern terrortories. You know, it occurred to me that Bush is a hand-me-down dictator. He wasn't voted into office, he was placed there by the Supreme Court, who were placed in that position. The only thing that would confirm him as dictator any more would be if the military had taken over The White House and demanded that He be their Capitol Fool For Life. That's what might have to happen next when he loses the election yet again to whatever media nightmare the Democraps throw into the gears of his marching bovine empire. He's probably already amassing cattle and troops in Florida for this graceless coup with his brother's help. Jeb, What a ing name... A whole army of back-assed cracker rednecks. Ladies and Gentlemen please welcome the Precedent of the United States of America, Jethro Bodine. Arnold Schwarzenegger? What next? Why not? Jump on board quick or suffer. The few remaining rebellious brave will be slaughtered. It's coming...
Perhaps I was born in the wrong empire. I hope God doesn't put all of us in the same small hell together. I pray daily, out loud, now and forever, that we may at least be doomed to different hells.
Okay. OK, Ok... The music, again.
Fortunately, this album ends. His boy band efforts have paid off and the last song bears all the pedantic resemblances necessary. I have begged all of my gods that this will be his last album but the universe is laughingly merciless. It chuckles at us from great distances. Music should be a metaphor for life. BT is more like a simile. A simile is never as full or as open as a metaphor, it restricts itself to being 'like' or 'as'. Great music transcends itself. 'Emotional Technology' is an album that tries to imitate albums that transcend themselves, or the feelings that produce those albums anyway. It is trying to be 'like' a great album. It is music of little consequence and what consequence is there is hyper inflated. It is a sterile ensemble of premises. Hyperactive emptiness. He should have called it, 'Electronic Insincerity'. I believe albums like this should be banned because they contain nothing truly obscene. Perhaps that is their real obscenity, the unforgivable offense. Probably neither. This music is not obscene, just tedious. The only true ban left in capitalism is lack of interest; we are truly free now, right? 'Thank George almighty we are free at last...'
'Successful' artists are ones who can create interest in themselves without any regard whatsoever to content. Music is a market and BT is for sale. The only vote left in either democratic or international capitalism is what to buy and what not to buy. Somehow we always seem to be left wanting something that's not for sale. It could easily be argued that BT is what we have made of him. He hadn't the strength or the courage to resist the temptations and trappings of the fame that he has gladly suffered. But I still blame Sasha for almost all of this. Had he not introduced BT's early work to the legion of record buying slaves that adore him we might have been able to write BT off as an obscurity, an anomaly. But no, Sasha is guilty and he had better be running. I might interview him soon... He had better pray to the god of aging dj's that he finds me in a mood of benevolence and mercy...
This album was not a very nice place to visit. Its neo-cult vibe invites horrors of uselessness; this album says absolutely nothing worth knowing. BT has worked very hard to aid electronic dance music in becoming a very ordinary and almost unnoticed social fact, for him it exists perhaps only on the surface of life and his marginal success there justifies his vain efforts. This kind of success is oppressive by nature and mocks the importance of true cultural accomplishment. It is a fantasy whose clock seems to be ticking, if there is to be any hope at all. BT is serenading pop stardom, asking people to consume his gestures of consumption. In this way BT does really connect with his audience, that legion of detestable imps: reasonably well adjusted middle class college kids.
O.K. The inevitable end...
One measure of tragedy is the psychological distance that exists between what we could have hoped for and what we actually get. In that regard BT is a truly pathetic post-modern tragedy. His first album ( IMA ) and a few related efforts around that time made a type of promise that remains unfulfilled. The talent that he possesses that he either cannot or will not express is what we are left to contend with, and that god-awful televangelist on the cover of his album endlessly preaching a capitalist nothing to undernourished consumer nobody's. When we expect so little we will receive even less...
Calling Your Name,
Sean Cusick, copyright control
Post-Script: I tried as best as I could to write a 'serious' review of the album. It drove my drinking to runaway proportions. If I had more strength I would sue Nettwerk Records for what it has done to me. At the very least I think they owe me $9.99, the marked-down price I paid for the album. I'll be waiting. Okay? |
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| eRRaTiK |
| quote: | Originally posted by Sand Leaper
and that god-awful televangelist on the cover of his album endlessly preaching a capitalist nothing to undernourished consumer nobody's. |
you mean this one?
:D
Not a fan of his new album and style, nor his DJ'g at two tribes Sydney two nights ago. However, as noted by many before me, his earlier works were masterpiece.
Btw, if you enjoy his new work good for you! |
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