Technical Drawings — The Ruined Map

Technical Drawings are a duo who utilise prepared electric piano and a lot of shiny processing equipment and electronics. They use these to create looping and percussive blocks of sound; or, to be crass about it, something that sounds like electronica or good old-fashioned dance music. To some extent, this is an exercise in maximalism - getting the most that one can out of an often minimised set-up; for example, a guitar, a loop pedal and a microphone, a prepared electric piano and a computer. This is fine in itself; to some extent the whole of free improv is based around this notion, and Aube’s entire career has revolved around it. However, having chosen to maximise this minimal set-up, Technical Drawings have then further limited themselves to structures and constructions clearly derived from electronica/IDM/etc; or at least aiming at them. This is a reasonable and brave venture, but not without problems.

The piano is a percussive instrument, and even with all the processing that Technical Drawings do, the sounds on this album remain almost predominantly percussive. This creates two problems for my ears: firstly, the sounds are somewhat homogenous - and given the complexity of some of the dense webs of loops, this leads to a lack of clarity, and secondly, whilst it has designs on electronica, it often feels closer to a drum circle… Indeed, the obvious knee-jerk comparison, is that its akin to a less sweaty, less vibrant Konono No.1. But the trance inducing nature of the Congo’s finest, and their warmth, is not really to be found on “The Ruined Map”. This kind of precision repetition and layering can be enthralling in the hands of, for example, Plastikman; but Technical Drawings share none of his patient build ups, his sense of space and architecture, nor his clarity of sound. They have a cluttered, compressed feel, which doesn’t allow any individual sound qualities - or processing - to shine through. One of the sounds which does stand out is a decidedly unprocessed piano, but unfortunately this just reminds me of the classic “pub piano” sound. “Strange Flora” has a vocal which blurs rap and spoken word; and it possibly doesn’t amount to much, but its still a welcome respite from the somewhat monochrome palette.

This isn’t a terrible album by any means. The start of “Underwater” is great, but all it does is make me want to listen to “Drukqs” by Aphex Twin - an album that shares many of Technical Drawings’ percussive sounds, but uses them with interesting structures and logic.

On a technical level, its impressive that “The Ruined Map” has been hewn out of a prepared piano; but alas it remains that: technically interesting. You could go to great lengths to train a kazoo orchestra to perfectly approximate Tony Iommi’s guitar sound, but at the end of the day, you’d still find yourself putting “Paranoid” on your turntable.