Maurizio Bianchi / M.B. & Maor Appelbaum — Innervation

In recent years, experimental electronics veteran Maurizio Bianchi has teamed up with a guy named Maor Appelbaum numerous times,  & churned  out a good number of CDs of which this is actually the first I’ve heard. I’m no stranger to Bianchi, having enjoyed a good deal of his works, & have felt sorry for the dude for all the liberties taken with his work, yet Appelbaum is entirely new to me. For the past few years he’s steadily been releasing music under a variety of monikers, but he’s been flying under my radar, it seems; it’s not as if, with a name like that (apple tree, roughly), I wouldn’t have caught on – if only I’d known.

Yet, listening to Innervation, I’m not sure whether I actually missed out. Bianchi? Yes, of course, he was brilliant, then he was out of it for a while, and now he’s been back for a while, but one wonders what happened. The inevitability of aging? The ripening of aesthetics? The Appelbaum? Fact is, Innervation is a disc that is by all means sensational – that is, if your frame of reference is limited to music only wholly uninspired, and if your fine appreciation of ambient-making (ambienting? Just coining here.) techniques hasn’t developed over a liking of sounds slowed to a halt in Sound Recorder, bit by bit by bit. Two minutes in, I’m already incredibly underwhelmed, detecting a pattern I hope I’m actually not detecting, but I am, and my spider sense, geared  towards mediocre ambient music, is tingling, and indeed there is first silence, and then a slowly building wave of whoosh and whoom, and then it softly fades out, and then it all happens again, and I feel like I’m caught in an endless loop of pale fluorescent lights fading in and out, buzzing at me and throwing their blanket of unattractive illumination over me, and I shiver, slightly.
 
Do you know this neat tool called PaulStretch? It is, by all means, pretty neat. You take a sound file, any sound file, and you run it through PaulStretch, and it, ah, yes, stretches it, to most extreme lengths if you wish, and the outcome is invariably that of whoosh and whoom. It is a pretty darn good way to feel good about yourself cranking out wicked sounds with as little effort as possible, to submerge yourself in a sea of shapeless, heartless sounds, and possibly your impressionable friends, who just might find it sensational. Yet the sounds, in reality, are as tired and trodden as my lingo, and anyone thinking twice about slapping the soporific result onto a disc deserves a good spanking, or a wag of the finger at the least, or a bad review.  And honestly, while I will steer clear of implying that either of the artists involved resorted to any type of means so awfully bland, I think the resulting material does nothing to distinguish itself from what might have been cooked up with a set of random MP3s and a 500k download. And that, above all things, is a shame.