3 out of 5

Label: Discrepant

Produced by: ?

“Originally created for Optimized! (on WFMU), which featured three days of programming curated by Vicki Bennett (People Like Us), comprising ten hours of new and exclusive recordings, radio and video by 26 participants.” The series “experimented with ideas of what radio might be in the world of high speed internet broadcasting … where people were invited to respond to the word “optimized”.”

Okay. Background info unlocked.

Coming into this as a PLU fan, Vicki’s side of this LP is truly excellent. While it’s maybe hard to assess how her mash-ups here match the theme – or, rather, how they differ from other compositions; as I can make a case for the theme, but I could probably do the same with other PLU stuff as well – the 20ish minute blend of different eras’ pop musics and beat samples and sound effects is the best blend of humor and melody and emotion that occurs in Bennett’s most focused works. We start from a place of buoyant quirk, and then the piece kind of shifts and mold to feel a bit more open-ended, and curious. A Jetson’s sound effect puts it back on an upbeat path… then comes back to ground once more; a nice parabolic wave of feelings. It’s a full-range PLU track that, as always, impresses with how many things Vicki stuffs in there and manages to weave together, but also keeps its eye on a prize of stitching the whole thing up as a listenable song.

Coming into this without any references to Porest, their side is harder to assess. It is the reason I rate this lower, but not because their contribution is bad, more because it’s not something I’d listen to very often. It’s essentially a 20-minute sketch; it’s radio recordings that have been either manipulated (or made wholesale to sound like recordings, or both) and presented as commercials or news reports. There’s… not music; it’s sound manipulation. The subject matter is pretty funny, though its on-the-nose qualities kind of make it like an SNL sketch, but some of it is also laugh-out-loud absurd – like having a social group called “viceis” (that’s read to sound like ISIS). In the background, you’ll get some effects that further betray how much of a hand Porest is taking in making the stuff, and some of the voices are clearly speak-and-spell type generated, but, again, its just not something I’d put on on a whim. I guess if I was assessing this as a comedy record, sure, but I approached it for the PLU work and was thinking maybe the B-side would have a matching offering.