5 out of 5

Label: Tresor

Produced by: Simon Davey (mastered by)

A lot of Gerald Donald’s post- or Drexciya-adjacent projects have been interesting, but, to my ears, end up sounding too conceptually contrived: whatever mathematic, scientific, or psychological concept Donald is representing makes sense as a framework, and then results in tunes that just don’t drive me very much; the stuff thrives on being experimental, and maybe not directly enjoyable.

Whether it’s just hammering myself with enough of Donald’s work for it to finally click, or that XOR Gate’s Conic Sections’ theme is more in line with my tastes, this is a project that very quickly played through my skeptical barriers, and proved to be a dense, involving work.

The pseudonym itself factors in: while the bandcamp page gives a brief rundown, I prefer the wiki definition of XOR Gates, a logic gate often used in various electronic circuits: when inputting two values, “a true output results if one, and only one, of the inputs to the gate is true.” This gives things a very, very prescribed sense, “a curve obtained from a cone’s surface intersecting a plane.” Each track on the album is named after a type of, or vocabulary related to conic sections, which I kinda sorta view, philosophically, as a 2-dimensional idea coming across a 3-dimensional one. And if these are the two inputs through your XOR Gate…

I dunno. All bullshit. But the evolution of the album’s sound starts in what I’d consider very “typical” Donald territory, as it’s quite repetitive and limited, as though composed by math equation. This is appropriately titled: Circle. A closed loop. From here, though, the ideas expand outward, and I think what’s most exciting about the sound is how dark it is, exploring darker worlds of electro and allowing that baseline framework to serve as just that – a baseline – for spreading, bleeding out into the surrounding darkness. The shapes of the conic sections guide things, but the intersection of 2- and 3D is impossible to truly grasp.

Though this ultimately has the kind of tight vibe of Donald’s works, tonally, it gives me early Aphex ambient vibes, or some of the softer stuff on the Richard D. James album. No right-minded techno person would likely give those comparisons, but Aphex / RDJ is still what I grew up on, so it tends to be my touchpoint. I think Drexciya’s iciness is where you start, then you step off with Donald’s way of framing everything with math and science, but then it’s like you replace one side of the equation with a question mark. That’s the feeling I get when listening to Conic Sections: exploratory, but with a mindset that realizes you might never come back from the darkness.