4 out of 5

Label: P2

Produced by: Colin Marston (recorded / mixed / mastered by)

I am positive I’m not intelligent enough to explain what’s happening on this album. The CD came with a sticker that seemed to be suggesting that there were no ‘traditional’ instruments used… and then the liner notes do list a whole bunch of electronic-y things like V-drums and guitar synths, but also “acoustic percussion,” (what?) and Colin Marston’s Warr Guitar, which, last I saw, was still a guitar, although fair enough – hardly traditional.

When I read reviews for this, those reviewers are pretty much confirming my lack of intelligence, talking about the compositions with references I cannot comprehend. There’s music theory chugging along behind a lot of music I enjoy, and I get to smile and nod along; Marston’s various projects operate on an extreme side of that informedness, with Arctopus taking the wankery prog levels to extremes, draped in the hardcore / metal imagery of a lot of his other projects, but often so abstracted that it’s hard to hear anything except for endless scales of notes.

I mean, I love it, but it’s its own bag of incredibly precise non-music, and I wouldn’t blame anyone for rolling their eyes out of their head. And then there’s Interstellar Overdrive’s synthesized, processed sound, which is like an 80s synth horror movie soundtrack as played by a multi-instrument savant whose brain is stuck in a loop and on fast forward. Yeah, check out that album art of a robot zooming through space with speed lines behind him – that’s the only part of this of which I can make sense.

Anyhow, amongst B… TA’s output, I found Interstellar Overtrove to be its most accessible work to date. Once you get over the actual sound of it – which sounds so pithy and flat at first, with the drums and synths lacking range, but then grows in atmosphere and depth the more time you give it – and beyond some arguably unnecessary electronic glitchiness on the first track which kinda just seems like an attempt to prove this isn’t EZ-listening fare, it’s bizarrely (in comparison to the band’s works in general) catchy, given how avoidant of repetition and predictability it otherwise is. It’s all scales and tip-a-tap percussion and then kind of prog-builds via swooshes and swirls of this same towards the a closing pair of tracks which total about fifteen minutes together: the ambient-leaning Echoes of Deletion, which finally allows things to explode into more ‘natural’ sounds towards its conclusion, which leads to another punny title (following things like “Def Lepton”), “SETI: The Search for Entertaining Terrestrial Incompetence,” which somehow puts an appropriate cap of smooth-prog epicness on a juxtaposingly overblown and minimal-ized production.

Nah, I have no idea.