“Beau Wanzer’s twelve track album of material culled from old tapes vacuums up the atmosphere and wears your teeth down to stubs…”
Half of the fun of listening to an album like the Untitled LP is coming up with language that can come close to describing it. There’s more of a challenge with a record that seems to take the entire history of electronic music and collapses it down to the size of a single 12″ record.
Most people have been focusing on Beau’s gritty, droning tracks, but those are only part of the overall picture on Untitled. Wanzer works with a palette that includes the stuff of wondrously numbing dreams as well as dreams of fever. “Groove’s No Zone” glides in a way that many of the new noise records do not. “Headspace” is simply one of the most graceful, beautiful electronic tracks I’ve ever heard. That may sound perverse based upon the reports you’ve been reading, but it’s really not: this is a piece of music that will stay with me for a long time.
Untitled comes at you in a series of pulses and short bursts. Only one track surpasses four minutes and most are shorter than three, and seems to have been engineered to keep either its audience or its creator from fidgeting or becoming bored. But despite apparently being the pickings of Wanzer’s archives of unreleased tracks from 2002 to 2008, it holds together around two or three extraordinary tracks and five or six beautiful ones.
