»Bitchitronics«, the fourth LP by Bitchin Bajas, throws us a few red herrings. The title itself is misleading: The music is too full of details, too elaborate to be called »bitchi«. And for the second part of the title (»tronics«), it has just too little to do with groove. Nothing, to be precise. Instead, the sound by the project around Cooper Crain from Chicago, Illinois, is based on a fetishizing love for synthesizers and creaking cassette-recordings. The sounds coming from those sources are being modeled and stretched until they dissolve in sheer beauty. Sometimes it seems as if layers of ambient, coming to life by the defoliation of these soft sounds, start to breathe. »Transcendence« gives us a hint of that very phenomenon, being picked up by »Inclusion«, which lightly brushes cosmic spheres with its organ-sounds. Unfortunately, Bitchin Bajas don’t trust the soft spell they create enough to keep going. Instead, they have added some guitar-sounds to »Transcendence«, some flute-samples to »Inclusion«, leading the listener on a wrong track, far away from hypnoses. In the first case, the writers have tried to be reminiscent of Robert Fripp, in the second case of Alice Coltrane. Well, quite honestly I think that that’s just going a bit too far. The second part impresses me with its sparingness because it abstains from overusing too many notes. In particular, the five-minutes-track »Sun City« becomes a real highlight through its frugality. In addition, »Turiya« is persuasive because it knows how to avert the track from tilting into esoteric waters. Still, in its 15 minutes playing time, there is a tiny lack of detail to bemoan.
Bitchitronics
