RG Rough - 80 [Bam Balam - 2025]" /> |
80 is a collage work of samples and snippets culled from the eponymous decade and worked into two long tracks, each with a rather telegraphic title, "80:81:82:83:84" and "85:86:87:88:89", respectively. This is the third and final installment in a trilogy that began with 60, and then 70. The source material is necessarily limited in the scope of such a copy-and-paste project, so the familiarity with the sampled sounds will certainly depend on where you spent your 80s, or how you came to acquire an affinity for said decade. Why the archive fever? The question seems to linger like the stale air of a basement room throughout, whether intended or not. The first of the two tracks leans more toward the atmospheric, borrowing from the media-specific instrumentation of the early 80s, its processing thin and playful, if a little light on the low end. The second track picks up the beat a bit and uses drum machine samples, a la Prince and early hip hop, to produce a groovier affair. Of course, the project is haunted by a forest-for-the-trees problematic, shifting between homage to individual sources and attention to the larger work. The transitions are seamless and expertly processed, which speaks to the craft of such an endeavor. That said, with the total in mind, the result of much of 80 is to sound a lot like era Talking Heads, sans vocals. Is that a problem, or perhaps an unwitting tribute to the band's ability to have filtered the diverse sounds around them way back when?
Fans of collaged work and nostalgia in general will be happy here. As with any retro-project, though, the risk of alienating those who actually lived through the sonic landscape on offer is pretty great. For more   Colin Lang
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