Remember when electronic musicians had overwhelmingly simple artist names?
Plaid, AFX, LFO: all of them kept it simple, stupid. Now exhausted of the mono-syllabic monikers, artists are having to dig deeper.
This doesn’t mean that Holobeams and Broken Machines have bad name, it’s just that we all know that if they’d existed in 1994, they would have been callewd simply Beam.
No matter: songs like Ground Frost (or to give it its mid-90’s name, Frost) will slip quietly and effortlessly into your collection of skitteringly rigid, pumellingly soft dance music however you choose to order your CD rack.
Perhaps the sneakiest of the tricks pulled in Ground Frost is that it seems to be endlessly building to an effervescent point, but never does. The song slips away cunningly, and most listeners’ response will be to simply press play again, just in case the apogee was missed.
Thus, Holobeams and Broken Machines have created a Mobius Strip of a song, endlessly turning in on itself, constantly coiling, and never getting closer to the goal you mistakenly perceive. Peculiarly satisfying.