10. Mark Fell
Revelatory meditations on a classic FM synth sounds. The end of an era and the beginning of one. I came to his music maybe later in my life, and he’s one of those guys where you just slap your head and go "Oh man, how have I not known about this guy?" Only in the last couple of years have I approached him. He does micro-electronic stuff, kind of like preceded a lot of labels that have since flourished with that, like Raster-Noton and Editions Mego. What he’s done – and I think this must be a running theme of things that I like – as far as liberating an idea from its historical context. Like Feldman and Varese, it’s him taking these dance sounds, these FM synth sounds that you hear in techno even, and isolating them, turning them into this simple object which is hanging on your wall. And in doing so, it’s reduced to something so pure that it’s profound and it’s absurd. And it’s powerful and funny. It’s so simple, the idea behind it. Production-wise, he has his own methodology that I’m not too sure about. It’s not basic, but it’s so obvious in its clarity, that it makes you ask, "How has someone not done this already?" So profound in a way. It’s so simple, this idea. It’s literally one pulsing sound. You understand it, but you are thinking "How do I listen to this? What is it for?"
