The Incident

"Master of the seriously absurd, a mercurial jester of the airbenders, Rashad Becker finally unveils his Clunk label - named after his esteemed mastering studio - opening with his first album of new work in almost a decade. ’The Incident’ is full of devilishly adventurous takes on electro-acoustic systems and displaced imaginary rituals - an absolute must-listen if you’ve a thing for Autechre, Florian Hecker, Dariush Dolat-Shahi, CC Hennix, Parmegiani, Henry Flynt or Harry Partch.

As the iconic set of ears behind too many mastering and sound design jobs to count, Rashad Becker has subtly helped re-shape perceptions of electronic and club-based music for nigh-on four decades. His eventual release of original solo music with two volumes of ‘Traditional Music for Notional Species’ for PAN in 2013 + 2016 followed years of revered live and studio practice to generate two of that decade’s definitive experimental sides, both adored and admired for their illusive, psychoacoustic derangements, organised with a noumenal grasp of fictional dynamics which gave his sounds shape and unique properties that have played heavily, weirdly on the mind ever since. 

It’s not just random noise, dear: Rashad’s music beckons, seduces and prompts the imagination to make great leaps and join dots across epochs and dimensions by twisting myriad traditions, vernaculars and temporalities with a singular storytelling style and logic. Still with us? Good, ‘cos you’re in for a treat with Becker’s keenly awaited new album ‘The Incident’, which instrumentally reflects a ludicrousness of modern life and the overload of the information age, with results similar to the historic efforts of surrealists, pataphysicists, dada and fluxus movements to make sense of humanity’s psychic distress during times of war and socio-economic churn. Most importantly, Becker yields a music that operates on hyperrealistic, sensuous terms, squirming between known styles to probe bits of grey matter not many other musics tends to reach.

Presuming the user has a working knowledge of electronic music history and its relationship to synthetic artifice, as much as a knowledge of far-flung traditional styles and their filtering of ancient folklores, Becker builds fanciful worlds of disorienting delirium, deploying a complexity of ideas at the service of riveting, abstract storytelling. Like some alien raconteur speaking in sonic glyphs, he has us spellbound on a confounding journey from burbling, plonging pulses and fairground melodies, taking in the anxious chatter of synthetic voices, stereo-tattered destabilisations, and general mind-bending gloop, sloshing gamelan viscosities into rhythmelodic interplays back thru modal jazz improvisations to much more ancient microtonal methods of expression. 

Perhaps most impressive and absorbing are the album’s closing couplet, where Rashad slows us right down and deep into his labyrinthine sound on the 13 minutes of ‘Deadlock’ and the 18 minute parting piece ‘What Really Happened’, which both serve to illuminate and obfuscate in their durational explorations of the shadowland between reality and its semi-digital analogues, with a deliciously mind-gurning confusion rewarded in return."

- Boomkat