DAVID K FRAMPTON - THE FOLLOWING

 

This work of outsider electronica is David K Frampton’s first fully instrumental solo album release and one that harkens back to his EDM origins with Truck Pitch and Process Records in the late 1990s. The head honcho of Eyeless Records has often favoured a raw approach to recording and mixing – wrong notes sometimes left in, adding oyster grit to pristine melodies – that recalls the home studio origins of Ariel Pink or R. Stevie Moore. A cultivated naivety has been a feature of his solo work since Love Songs and Other Mysteries. Here we’re without the Brighton-based artist’s fragile high-pitched vocal lead and harmonies that can sometimes recall the dream pop gauze of Sigur Ros on releases like Tune Flower. He draws for this album upon the minimal techno and isolationist dub influences of Robert Hood and Scorn circa Gyral to produce a set of variations on simple rhythmic themes. Frampton manipulates drum beats and bass lines live to produce six meditations, as he puts it, “on the darkness [and] spinning infinities inside us all.”

Frampton explains The Following is an “enquiry into cults, radicalisation and arcane beliefs and how they effect and create meaning in the individual as we search for meaning and validation ourselves.” If you want a good theoretical accompaniment and guide for his musical imaginarium on this release, you could do worse than Erik Davis’ media studies classic TechGnosis: Myth, Magic & Mysticism in the Age of Information. An examination of the mystical compulsions underlying the Western obsession with technologies of communication, Davis’ secret history abounds with provocative concepts like ‘spiritual cyborgs’ and the ‘Datapocalypse’. The metaphysical impulses of Gnosticism have, Davis argues, implanted themselves in our technologies rather than, as some historians have assumed, being supplanted by them. UFO cults; the proselytizing of psychedelic gurus like Timothy Leary; the attraction towards conspiracies, paranormal phenomena and pop science fiction; the avatar existences of virtual reality and the metaverse - all are manifestations of the “transcendent urge that animates gnostic desire”.

The six lengthy tracks on The Following could be describing “the tension between consciousness and the machine” central to Davis’ notion of techgnosis. The austerity of Frampton’s palette and a sometimes sedate pace (a kind of lopsided waltz-time on ‘Deep Woods’) acquires as a model the accumulation of affect and meaning through repetition that the critic Philip Sherburne identifies as a central ingredient of minimal techno. Other improvisational techno artists like Vladislav Delay and CoH produce music that seems relatively texture rich in comparison. Frampton refers to John Carpenter and Autechre as influences, but the shuddering dubscapes of Pole seem just as relevant a reference point for the slower, sparser tempos of ‘Depth Flower’ and ‘Forbidden Electricity’. He uses filter and delay adjustments to open fresher spaces that only serve to remind the listener of an overall single-mindedness of pursuit matched with an obscurity of goal. Not that Frampton lacks a goal; more that the collective trance state his music describes seems more impulsive than teleological in orientation.

‘Real Meta’ is the standout track here. Its motorik bounce recalls Kraftwerk’s Autobahn as other tracks often suggest the real-time improvisation of 70s analog electronica exemplified by Harmonia’s first album. It’s a reminder of electronic dance music’s utopian origins, just as the blurred, distant beat of ‘Forbidden Electricity’ suggests some steam-driven loom that subsumes liberation in discipline. A central theme of Davis’ book, one that has only become more obvious since first publication in the late 90s, is that our technologies of communication are both promising and dangerous. Similarly, Frampton’s music draws inspiration from the notion of the dancefloor as an anachronous space of candlelight and punishment. The wonky, unquantized nature of his beats accentuates the notion of a kind of medieval techno, one whose rhythmic patterns never quite cohere in a way that fulfils libidinal expectations.

‘Follow The Woods To Die’, the album’s final track, could be describing the last days for members of a Heaven’s Gate-style cult treading a path towards their final extra-terrestrial rendezvous/place of collective suicide. The Book of Revelation is itself, for Davis, a “kind of metavirus” or “a code to be cracked” that continues to colour the apocalyptic fantasies of today. Frampton uses music, as Davis does words, as a form of code to illuminate the way our technologies merge with our subconscious desires to produce an imaginative space both seductive and potentially destructive in its atemporality. The hermetic dancefloor Frampton creates in The Following is a product of what Davis calls “reason and its own hallucinatory excess”, shifting between fable and contemporaneity. It’s one that casts hypnotic spells while its beats unfold, but also one you’re relieved to escape from by its conclusion.

The Following is out now through Eyeless Records and available on Bandcamp:

https://davidkframpton.bandcamp.com/album/the-following

Text: (C) Copyright by Jon Kromka 2022