David Matuch Michael - Brain Storm: Adventures In Hypoxia [CD]

Newcomer David Michael Matuch proclaims on the first track to his debut Carpe Sonum long-player "Soft, In the Head", but as this wonderful album proceeds apace, one might be better inclined to think SF writer Thomas Disch's short story title, "Fun With Your New Head". This disc's gonna do your noggin in for sure, because Matuch has a trick or two up his sleeve that other wannabe electronic muckrakers can but merely galavant about in. Take "Lost At Shore", for instance. Sure, there's the requisite oceanic wishy-wash but look more closely at the reefs and your eyes take in all kinds of strange, synthetic life teeming about the anemones, talking in long digitized broadstrokes and alien tongues lost in weird dialog. "Neural Highway (Joyride)" is acutely Orb-like in it's engaging moonbounce, traveling the pathways energetically thanks to a phalanx of sprightly marimba and the kind of trippy surrealism Thomas Dolby made a big deal of years ago when his mind's eye crashed the gateway. "Cerebral Vortex" turns the modular tables so suddenly you might be caught unawares, tumbling down infinite rabbitholes of abyssal synth, vibrating drones, and austere creepiness, but once you quickly right yourself, Matuch's gift of atmospheric gab situates your head in a more serene place. The eleven minutes of the successive "Brain Storm" promises all manner of psychic turbulence, but fear not: across it's vast, engulfing timespan the affect is more like a welcoming, deeply-earned REM sleep than anything catastrophic. Matuch enables your moodstates so expertly you're left pretty agog at the disc's past magnificence once the post-classical, string-soaked elegance of "Mindset" brings the album to a foregone conclusion.