Galcid - Hope And Fear (Detroit Underground)

https://detund.bandcamp.com/album/hope-fear

She probably released what was one of my top albums of 2016 with "Hertz".  Really high hopes for this one.

Juno Review:

It’s easy for mastery of synthesis to become about subtlety and refinement – using a wall of modular to elicit the perfect tone. But what about pushing to the other extreme? Sometimes you want to see someone with towers of equipment wrenching unimaginable cascades of sonics out of ungainly patches, with all the grit and dirt left in for good measure. Formerly a duo, now solely the work of Lena Saito, Galcid is one such venture where you can have some faith that all that lush studio gear isn’t going to waste. Saito has returned to Detroit Underground, a label with its own embrace of futurism and technology as a wild and unknowable frontier. The result is an album that snarls out its identity in a flash.

The dazzling array zapping through the opening stretch of ‘Awareness’ is hard to fathom – it’s an acrobatic display of what can be achieved across the stereo field. The sound palette is a noisy mix of analogue and digital blips, shrieks and thumps, pushed into the red and placed right up front so the sculptural imagery of the sound occupies your cerebral cortex. It’s an exercise in engineering as much as an expression – a celebration of what machine music can do when you let the machines set the tone.

There are more conventional moments – the acidic throb coursing through ‘Undulation’ feels like a familiar foothold even if the overall construct of the track is brilliantly non-standard. There is also some space for melodic levity, such as on ‘Electronic Flash’ which pivots around a beautiful, skittering chord tone. But by and large, this is a place to enter when you want to be shocked by the startling newness of everything. The cyberpunk styling is hard to refute when it’s executed this well. With this album, Saito has laid out a formidable case for her position amongst the upper echelons of contemporary machine manglers. 

Just listened - what a wild ride. Highly recommended.

  On 3/1/2021 at 5:27 PM, Extralife said:

It’s easy for mastery of synthesis to become about subtlety and refinement – using a wall of modular to elicit the perfect tone. But what about pushing to the other extreme? Sometimes you want to see someone with towers of equipment wrenching unimaginable cascades of sonics out of ungainly patches, with all the grit and dirt left in for good measure. Formerly a duo, now solely the work of Lena Saito, Galcid is one such venture where you can have some faith that all that lush studio gear isn’t going to waste. Saito has returned to Detroit Underground, a label with its own embrace of futurism and technology as a wild and unknowable frontier. The result is an album that snarls out its identity in a flash.

The dazzling array zapping through the opening stretch of ‘Awareness’ is hard to fathom – it’s an acrobatic display of what can be achieved across the stereo field. The sound palette is a noisy mix of analogue and digital blips, shrieks and thumps, pushed into the red and placed right up front so the sculptural imagery of the sound occupies your cerebral cortex. It’s an exercise in engineering as much as an expression – a celebration of what machine music can do when you let the machines set the tone.

There are more conventional moments – the acidic throb coursing through ‘Undulation’ feels like a familiar foothold even if the overall construct of the track is brilliantly non-standard. There is also some space for melodic levity, such as on ‘Electronic Flash’ which pivots around a beautiful, skittering chord tone. But by and large, this is a place to enter when you want to be shocked by the startling newness of everything. The cyberpunk styling is hard to refute when it’s executed this well. With this album, Saito has laid out a formidable case for her position amongst the upper echelons of contemporary machine manglers. 

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Pasting formatted text as white on black background and not nixing the formatting is evil. This editor explicitly ask if you want to remove formatting from what you've pasted - make it so.

Embedding Bandcamp releases is horrible in more ways than one. The only way to get the release id this editor's embedding mechanism accepts is to choose Share/Embed on the Bandcamp release page, then Embed this album, then Select a style (any will do), copy the iframe HTML (all of it, it doesn't allow selecting just the id); then get back to this editor, click Bandcamp Player Embed on the toolbar, paste the HTML in the Bandcamp Wordpress Album id field, remove everything before and after the numeric id (found after the string "album=" up until the next forward slash), accept. I've done enough of that to have it in muscle memory, but FFS it's tedious when I explicitly describe how to do it. Why use an opaque system-internal numeric identifier with no semantics beyond uniqueness? Why not the release page URL, which could also have the id in it if the human readable URL to release id mapping is impossible to implement. Also, it would be trivial to extract the id from the embedding HTML with a regexp: /album=(\d+)/ - it's not rocket surgery.

If that's not Farnsworth-worthy, nothing is.

  On 3/1/2021 at 9:46 PM, dcom said:

Embedding Bandcamp releases is horrible in more ways than one.

Just by giving the Bandcamp release page's HTML source a quick look I found a much better implementation for embedding with just the id: ask for the release page URL, make a simple HTTP request to get the HTML, give it to an XML parser, extract the embed URL via XPath //meta[@twitter:player]/@content, extract id from URL with a regexp, done. There are 38 occurrences of the id in the HTML, but there's no human-friendly way to get it.