Deastro - Incinerator

I've been writing about Deastro's music, now and then...for almost five years and each year I've thought I was, at least somewhat, sure of what it was, what it sounded like....

A year ago, I realized, that even as I try to decipher whatever-his-latest-work-was, or is, I'd have to throw out any preconceived notions... The mind alters, indeed...continues to alter. Randy Chabot is responsible for some of the sunniest and enthusing songs I've ever heard, as well as some of the murkiest, twisted-up and turbulent... Album to album, sometimes song to song, or dissonant movements/choruses/broken-bridges within the composition.

Chabot began garnering attention with his 2007 demos, a 21-year-old computer composer poking his head out in the golden age of electro-auteurs such as Caribou, M83, Fields, and still-prominent veterans like Four Tet or more fickle flashes like Cold Cave. In those 5 years, he's regenerated his airy, synth-saturated song-cycles out to widely scattered points of sonic sensibility and musical mood - techno, goth, space-rock...

But, as I started, this shouldn't be about who Randy Chabot was, or even is now - he learned long before Incinerator not to force himself to write the album that someone, anyone, ...you..., or I, might expect him to write.



"Prisoner" opens up with a jittery jogging bass, a funky growling thing over haunting drones and spliced up vocal-bursts. This is just one movement of up-to-four, inside a nearly 10-minute loping marathon. Hand-claps clatter atop the snuffling burst of sequenced beats while our singer raps this anthemic, chant-like chorus drenched to near-indecipherability by silvery coats of reverb. It's like searing through the stratosphere when you pass the four minute mark, the swell of layered elements pares back a bit and the song turns into more of a musing Krautrock churn, our vocalist turns cold, tinny, his humanity fuzzed-out to where he sounds like a Transformer...and then it all cuts away, right at 5:31... seven blissful seconds of just these tribal drum beats...meditative...
we catch our breath...
and a new movement begins, a new voice comes in, a cheerier bass groove starts jumping along under warming piano chimes and a sprite sprinkle of synth hooks...

Song to song...movement to movement...One thing, then something else. 

Perhaps best, then, to go with your gut. Follow the beats - don't be unsettled by those haunted-house-shrieks coming from down the hallway of the opening measures to "Tokyo Parasites..." Because, good god, just get into the whirlpool of those gravelly synths and your head starts spinning at the layered drums, the steady pulsing disco beat spilled over with those deep booming fills slamming onto the floor tom...you're hooked, this is dark shit, yes, but, like all effective specimens of dance music - trance-like.

And just as you're getting cozy into this nostalgic LCD-Soundystem-trip, eye-closing dance-out-freak-out, he swerves you hard to the left for a grating, guttural, drum-n-bass-toying interpretation of noise - "Experiment" - mystifying, erratic and, by comparison, brief barrage of laser beam cascades, chilly clicks, clacks and cathartic tonal wrings, beating along and bouncing to wherever...

The late-arriving drums of the title track welcome you back slowly from cacophony to a steadily waving hymn, the drums awakening under his voice as the synths hum steadily into this metallic hook...but you'll be sluiced down into a whole other song before the 3 minute mark...and, as we know, somewhere else entirely before this 9-minute closer finally burns away...

At just four tracks, Incinerator feels as though you've mined more than 10 different songs per-se... What Incinerator is, what it sounds like...is inherently something less tangible, thronged...untamed. Free to go somewhere else, three minutes from now...