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Not Breathing
The Black Old Pueblo

Sublight Records

Posted: Monday, March 19, 2007
By: Matthew Johnson
Features Editor

The title of The Black Old Pueblo evokes some abandoned temple to forgotten elder gods, rather like what Lovecraft would have written about had he lived in Arizona rather than New England. A place, in other words, very much like the home studio of Not Breathing's Dave Wright. From this dark space, Wright bends time, space, sanity, and the circuit boards of toy musical instruments, splicing it all together into a mutated Frankenstein's monster of bleary blips, metallic breakbeats, and video game samples conjured up from the depths of time—or at least the 1980s, as evidenced by the Metroid references on ambient glitch track "Monsoons with Kraid." While The Black Old Pueblo is a bit choppier overall than Wright's previous couple of releases, there's still plenty of the dark atmospheres and complex rhythmic abstractions he's best known for. "Rotorhator Blackrider" is swampy and bubbling, while the echoing high-pitched clicks of "Smell of Europa" are at once cavernous and somehow biological, like a chorus of blind cave insects chattering to one another in the darkness. "Whitesands Blackhole" hints at science fiction themes with its cold drum loops, and "Dead Voices on Acetone," featuring a guest performance by Mark Spybey of Dead Voices on Air, mixes ominous textures with a solid head-nodding breakbeat. Wright's penchant for evil comedy and geeky music references is also in full effect on The Old Black Pueblo, and is particularly plain to see on "Pepito & The Casiophone" and its nod to '80s electro, not to mention album closer "What's Your Mama Wearin'," an industrial-strength deconstruction of down 'n' dirty 1970s music soul that ought to be familiar to fans of Free Death. Sick enough to make Aphex Twin seem mentally balanced and twisted enough to make even Hecate seem sober, The Old Black Pueblo is the kind of music your local NPR affiliate warned you about. Turn it up and see if you can resist its sinister charms.