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 interesting and wildly rambling segment about how the author of this work perceives Phillip K. Dick in all his strange proclivities and actions. It’s accompanied lightly by some Atari noises and atmospherics but the rant is the feature here and it’s a thoroughly enjoyable listen for all its oddity. The following track is the further sharp ambient turn mentioned before as gently warped pads and tape saturated atmospheres swirl about and play gently in a warm but gray ether. It occupies an interesting space between the two spoken word tracks of the album as it gently carries us into a philosophical quandary about the intricacies of Godzilla’s psyche, which is also quite peculiar but present a fun though experiment. 

The remainder of the album veers quickly back into the Atari-centric noise with “Five Fantasia On An Atari 2600” being a standout as a wonderful series of 2600 trills and beeps. This track certainly feels a lot like a nostalgic playthrough of a classic shooter on the system while the other two tracks lean in a more abstract variation, choosing to twist and re-contextualize the sounds. But it is overall a fun and quirky album, one that chooses to wander somewhat aimlessly in tone but carries a consistent, if not odd, narrative.