Do the words Boards of Canada, Negativland, and Mr. Bungle mean more than gibberish to you?
If the answer is yes, you should definitely check out LodemidiQuail, an electronica soundscaper with a fourth-dimensional lawnmower.
If the answer is no, what do you have to lose?
I am not a musician.
This may seem weird, coming from a writer that reviews music, but it’s true. This may be my letter of resignation to my editor, since I never divulged this information to him when I applied for the job, but whatever.
The point is, I never picked up a traditional musical instrument and made noise with it that could be construed as music. However, in college I picked up on a class called Introduction to Electronic Music. I thought, hey, I like industrial, trance, and sampling, maybe this is my time to do something cool.
And it was. I did a lot of cool things. The least cool thing I did was make a track that had an actual beat to it. I knew it. My fellow students knew it. My professor definitely knew it. This was because the actual beat is the easiest part of sampling: creating an intricate soundscape setting that moves you without a beat, that’s the tricky part.
LodemidiQuail succeeded where I failed.
In Drone Within the Void Portal, we experience a flavor of sounds that you wouldn’t normally blast out of your car stereo. This music is reserved more for backdrop effect while meditating in a dark room with a candle in front of you while you stare at a blacklit screen covered in your own dandruff.
Maybe that was too much information. Anways…
The point is, LodemidiQuail’s music is not dance music. It is experimental: it is emotion: all that crap that popular artists used to say they were all about. Like a piece of art at MoMA, it’s not there to have a hook or invoke a past feeling: it’s there to create an environment, a little mental biosphere of your own.
Now I’ll be honest, after listening to the whole album a couple times, I had to pop in Boards of Canada to decompress my brain. Maybe that is all LodemidiQuail is really missing in his/her own soundscape: a break for the listener to collect their thoughts before they dive into the next piece.
Song to Pay $1 for at iTunes: Unnecessary, even if they were listed, but I recommend listening to The Fourth Dimension. You can go to his/her site at www.myspace.com/lodemidiquail or check most of his stuff out at his archive tracks.
I give LodemidiQuail 3 out of 5 pulse generators.
Add 1/2 a pulse generator if you are a fan of ambient electronica. Subtract 1/2 a pulse generator if you only listen to Top 40.