Buzzin Electronic Music

Eric Copeland – Alien In A Garbage Dump 12″ – Review

Eric Copeland: Alien In A Garbage Dump

Eric Copeland has released the EP Alien In A Garbage Dump on 12” vinyl as a precursor to a full length with his band Black Dice coming in 2009. Alien In A Garbage Dump picks up where his previous album Hermaphrodite left off and consists of seven electronic mixes of fragmented ideas and sounds. The EP teases and criticises the American stimulus machine with a warped sense of humour and a nightmarish perspective.

The music is literally buzzing with skewed sounds jutting in, fragmenting, combining, clashing and disturbingly repeating in a seemingly unending spiral. The songs are overloaded, often with highly polished sounds that in the throng become frayed and distorted. Alien In A Garbage Dump is clearly a comment on the intense overstimulation, desperate delusion, and relentlessness of modern city life.

Every now and then, though, sunshine breaks through on Eric Copeland’s world. The end of the song ‘Alien In A Garbage Dump’ sees a clean 3/4 time melody emerge after the preceding squall before it is brutally cut off only for similar sounds to reappear flattened and hoarse in the next song, the tonally warping ‘Corn On The Cob’.

And the moments of peace and retreat are striking by their rarity and distortion. The possibility of a carnival tune is always present on ‘Osni’, for instance, but it is under the near opaque veil of the production that distances the drums – too far away to properly hear. This is even more the case on ‘Scones and Bull’.

Yet there is hope amid the turmoil; there is a voice that doesn’t need to speak in contrived hip-hop rhymes and a tune that can be heard and recognised by all. This becomes more apparent as Alien In A Garbage Dump progresses, though that melody is at times loud, at others quiet.

Eric Copeland’s fairly short Alien In A Garbage Dump is described well by its title. It takes an alien perspective on a world brimming with garbage. The alien’s response on this album is one of confusion and overstimulation, with a small glimmer of happiness taken from the hectic world.

Listening to Eric Copeland is not always easy, particularly at the outset, but it is always artistically interesting, and worth listening to if only for that.

Eric Copeland releases Alien In A Garbage Dump exclusively on vinyl through Paw Tracks. Visit his MySpace page.