How meta can pop be without crumbling under the weight of the discourse? It’s been more than ten years that Akufen shouted his answer into the clubs by making minced format radio start to swing to the sounds of shrewd beat patterns. Now it’s not that far from Montréal to Baltimore, and still, the times of Matt Papich a.k.a. Co La are different ones. The club, as a place of pop, has given room to paranoia, while on the other side, in a sensual context, our expectation’s subversion gains a somewhat surreal comedy. That’s how on »No No«, medial debris and everyday noise, app-sounds and police sirens, poisoned computer-music candy and ragamuffin-rave, compression artefacts in HD, and, last but not least, half of the percussion sample bank’s exotic department (in short, everything that’s to be found on a busy hard drive) all fade into the waters of loose dance music, somewhere between grime and bubbling. This way, songs are created that quickly develop a soundtrack-like maelstrom, such as »Suffering (Tuesday)«. Then, there are aggregates like »Noon (Blue)«, sounding as if they’ve been recorded by a hand full of weird pinball machines. In many cases, both approaches are being combined, often enough successfully so. At other parts, it gets a bit dodgy, like when we’re asked to dance to a remix of death wails from old films, sardonic like James Din A4. Then you actually see Matt Papich on pictures that make him look like the young Jonny Rotten once tried to copy him, and only then do you start to ask yourself: What kind of guy is this? Is it an alien, targeting our environment like Fatima Al Qadiri targets our exotic clichés? Either way: This artist running with the pulse without keeping it on a short leash appears very lively in any case. All in all, it’s pretty amazing, and it perfectly fits into Daniel Lopatin’s Software Label
No No
