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Album Review

The Present
World I See LoAF Recordings

Article written by Paul M - Nov 1, 2008

The Present: World I See

Rusty Santos is best known for production duties for Panda Bear (Person Pitch), Animal Collective (Sung Tongs) and Born Ruffians (Red, Yellow & Blue). His own current musical project is The Present, an experimental, improvisational group with friends Jesse Lee and Mina. The album has six tracks, half of them over 11 minutes long, all of them a synthesis of the mechanical and organic. The key references are Bowie at his most experimental, Brian Eno, Laurie Anderson and perhaps Animal Collective and Ariel Pink. Electronic rhythms chunder away, constantly developing a theme; even when it sounds most processed, you’ll suddenly hear a delicate piano or the sound of voices looped (there are no conventional vocals – voices are treated like instruments) bringing it back to a human level.

World I See is long and mesmerising, rewarding the active listener. Sometimes sounds just leap out at you – the speeded up clicking fingers on ‘Africanised Beatniks’, for instance – while other songs sussurate gently for minutes at a time as with 13-minute electro-epic ‘Heavens On Ice’. ‘Symbols On High’ is the place to start if you need convincing: it begins with electronic humming until, about two-thirds through, the organic touch of familiar instruments shows – guitars scratching and picking, drums shuffling, piano tinkling – but to a non-Western scale. It has the same effect musically as staring into a painting, the music willing the viewer/listener into seeing patterns but not dictating what they see and hear. It’s elegant artrock in the truest sense, a tonic for the senses, and highly recommended.

Links:
http://www.myspace.com/thepresentnewyork
http://www.l-o-a-f.com/
http://www.myspace.com/rustysantos