Plastov - Mercury Riesling

 

Released: June 12

This latest album from Plastov is a rather wide-ranging exploration of rhythms and intricate synth layers that shares a few common threads. The thread that I picked up on the most is this certain controlled chaos found in the rhythmic structures. It’s like they are just all over the place, but constrained in a clever manner, like free range cats in a large closed off room. It feels playful for the most part, not taking itself too seriously, especially with its choices of bass tones. “Sacrificial Lambo” honestly feels like the one of the funnest tracks here, especially with its weird and pseudo-realistic bass line carved from a real bass and dipped in timestretching chopped loopy chaos. The rhythm on this one leans into the weird stuff the bass is doing with a kind of breakbeat approach that I really like and feel it’s a good combination that makes for a cool off the wall oddity of a track. 

Even with all the rhyming play, there’s still some interesting moments where the focus comes of the rhythm, most of the later parts of the album. “Luncheon Crawl,” while featuring and faint and often uncoordinated rhythm, it’s really mostly about those warbled and warped piano tones. They just sound so wonderfully twisted up and broken, plus the bit of rhythm here on this track sounds like it’s trying to follow them, stumbling the whole way. There’s also the final track on the album bearing the same title, “Mercury Riesling.” This one also pretty much eschews  rhythm but it is also just pure chaos wrapped up in a bag full of holes. I hear something that sound like an alarm bell, warped and reversed synth tones, and a bunch of other odd noises that just collide with one another. It’s a fun little listen, honestly. 

I really enjoyed this kind of duality in the album. Where there are some of the opening tracks that definitely lean into breakbeat, house, and techno elements pretty well, there’s some of the later tracks that just embrace a fully chaotic approach and send sounds in all kinds of direction. But with the more untethered tracks, we don’t get those fun and funky weird bass parts the some of the initial tracks have. They just give off a certain retro 90s aesthistic and it makes for a really neat element in these shuffled and jumbled high energy tracks.