Phirnis - The Gateway Tape

 Released: July 18

Coming back with his first album in three years, Phirnis brings us a collection of tracks that is here to wildly disregard any preconceived notions that may have been formed at first glance. It is an incredibly varied album filled with glitches, skips, and abrupt shifts that may cause a head scratch or two. But in all this wild swinging, there is an overall trend towards calmer and more subtle atmospheres as the album progresses. The opener, “No Effort Required,” absolutely swings for the fences in its approach with drums that start out glitching and stuttering then rapidly form themselves into a cohesive rhythm only to then suddenly fall completely apart in a stuttering mess. The next two tracks keep this theme going quite well and then something odd happens when the fourth track, “Synchronizing Failure,” starts up. It’s eerily quiet and calm with its airy tones and slight warble. As it progresses, some glitchy noise comes in but stays equally about as quiet. 

From this point, the album gets stranger as it shifts into a lower gear as far as pace but wavers between quiet and noisy. “Exposure” stays slow but turns the noise up giving us a tangled mess of loud warbles and  industrialized noises. Then “Sustainable Mutual Support” takes us back into the soft glitched out percussive noises with softly accompanying horn-like sounds that flutter and flicker among the glitches. With all this back and forth, you might think the album doesn’t know quite what it wants to be. But it knows exactly what it wants - it wants to disorient, to confuse, to be your gateway into the weird of places you find when you allow yourself to freely experiment. It’s a fantastically all over the place kind of album and one that is very adept at pushing the bounds without going too beyond the point of no return.