Beam Weapons - Potlatch
Released: April 3 The first album in years from UK-based electronic project Beam Weapons, Potlatch is an immensely intriguing collection of sounds that explores a range of tangentially-related subjects. It’s at time noisy and chiptuned while also veering into less noisy ambient features and bizarre but positively entertaining spoken word. For the first of these qualities, noisy is the prevailing mood throughout but there’s wide variance in the organization of that noise. The album starts with “Don’t Be a Dim Bulb,” which is a noisy but rhythmically oriented composition, though when I mean rhythmic I mean a solid kick drilling into you while Atari 2600 bleeps, bloops and, bitcrushes swirl sporadically around it. This is where the original album inspiration came from though, as a project to capture the various sound of the 2600 in all its lo-fidelity glory and nuance. The album starts taking sharp turns at track three, “What Would Philip K. Dick Do?’ This is a rather int...
