REVIEWS

Totakeke
eLekatota: The Other Side of the Tracks

Tympanik Audio

Posted: Friday, February 29, 2008
By: Ilker Yücel
Editor

While it has been some time since Totakeke's last album, the complex arrangement of intricate beat structures and ambient industrial atmospheres presented on eLekatota: The Other Side of the Tracks proves that Frank Mokros hasn't fallen into the trap of stagnation. Granted, there's not much deviation from what Mokros had achieved on his debut, At the Train Station on a Saturday Evening, but his formula presents an assorted enough mixture of sounds that it remains fresh in the mind of the listener as each track progresses. As the tracks on eLekatota all transition into each other rather smoothly, picking out individual pieces of music can be difficult, though it does display a sonic stream of consciousness with the right amount of musical peaks and valleys to keep it from sounding monotone. Several tracks do stand out though, such as "Millenia" with its subsonic bass pulses amid reverberating scrapes of metallic breakbeats. Some deceptively simple layers of synthesized arpeggios create eerie waves of audio tension as samples of Lance Henriksen from the debut episode of Chris Carter's Millennium from the late '90s add to the morose ambience. Also notable are the epic constructions of the almost 11-minute-long "Gift of Nervous Methods" in which manipulated voices sampled from various films - in lieu of lyrics - echo beneath the sonic surface to create a cavernous atmosphere as gyrating synth plucks and percussive layers that continuously hint at drum & bass, though without breaking into frenzy. Much of the album follows along these pathways, and while the tracks certainly don't sound identical to each other in structure or melody, there is a thematic flow to the album that, though enticing and adding to Totakeke's sense of consistency and complexity, also could impair one's ability to listen to the record from beginning to end in one sitting. Still, eLekatota: The Other Side of the Tracks deserves much credit for its elaborate production and composition without being oppressively complex to the point that it becomes too daunting a task to listen.