On 4n_Objx, Gryphon Rue plays with sonics in a way that a visual artist might manipulate light. The Brooklyn musician’s third album offers a series of trompe-oreilles, where the terrestrial countervails the hyperreal, revealing areas of sound in high relief. Rue, for the record, is the great grandson of Alexander Calder, a giant of American sculpture whose contemporaries included artists such as Joan Miró, Piet Mondrian and Marcel Duchamp. The famous kinetic artist’s sculptures have clearly had a bearing on Rue’s own sound sculpting – even if by creative osmosis – but it was another of Calder’s friends, Edgard Varèse, who’s ideas of “sound as living matter” that have had the most influence on his approach to composing.
The titular cypher 4n_Objx gives us some clue as to Rue’s intentions with this record, where synthetic or alien objects inhabit the natural world, attempting to blend in or homogenise. Moreover, that titular hotchpotch of numbers and letters conveys meaning but also suggests a digital conglomeration that isn’t strictly human. Opener ‘High Priestess’ grips us with its clattering rhythms and pastoral psychedelic peregrinations, coming on not unlike the freakout from ‘Strawberry Fields’ (the best bit for any discerning listener), though there are voices hiding in the undergrowth too that stretch out unnaturally causing the timbre to deepen. It could create a sense of mystery if you manage to tune into it, but there’s also potential for wariness and fear, a latent gremlin in the system that could prompt the trip to go one of two ways.
Elsewhere, on tracks like ‘Shibboleth’, Rue creates a near-future reality that could have come from the mind of William Gibson, and yet the microplastics in our blood and the UPFs in our stomachs suggest the dystopian future is already upon us. Nevertheless, it’s not an album that shakes its head in disapproval or judges us sanctimoniously, but rather one that embraces the absurdity and the madness of our moment, as a track like ‘World’s Fastest Talking Man’ demonstrates. Rue samples the actual world’s fastest talking man, chopping his vocals up with several cattle auctioneers, creating a fast-paced landscape that’s designed to playfully disorientate.
Rue’s work continues to bridge the worlds of electronica and the avant-garde, which certainly isn’t unusual of itself, though on 4n_Objx it’s his impish collage work that elevates this release above what’s come before. Elements of field recordings and sampling, analogue and digital instruments, live performance and studio work, all come together as a sum greater than its parts. If we’re throwing the names of artists around then these tracks evoke in sound the bold and playful paper creations of, say, Kurt Schwitters a century ago, a kind of Merz converted into hertz.
