Thomas Pynchon meets Minimalist Noir

[Johnny Marr]

*Not an Inherent Vice review, but part of a half-yearly musical overview

*
http://www.tinymixtapes.com/features/favorite-30-albums-of-2012-so-far-staff-feature


Ian Martin - Mechanical Rain

There’s an eerie scene at the start of Thomas Pynchon’s *The Crying of Lot
49*. Coasting along the Los Angeles freeway, Oedipa Maas recalls the first
time she opened a transistor radio and saw a printed circuit. Suddenly, the
broad blank face of the postmodern world fell away, exposing its
technological mystery in a revelation that, for Oedipa at least, trembled,
religiously, just past her understanding. That’s what it feels like to
listen to Ian Martin’s *Mechanical Rain*. Martin’s a Rotterdam DJ with a
penchant for Italo-disco and techno-funk, but you wouldn’t know it from the
minimalist noir that marks his new album. Using nothing more than two
vintage synths (no drum machines, please), he’s left the dance floor to
chart the strange sonic innards of a claustrophobically familiar world, all
the hums and drups and hisses of the vents behind the vents of your
apartment complex or office cubicle. I would call it ambient, if it weren’t
so damn cinematic; I would call it industrial, if it weren’t so cosmic; I
would call it grim, if I didn’t feel like I could dance to it. Anyway you
slice it, though, these six tracks will carry your ears to the brink of
techno-paranoid ecstasy and leave you, like Pynchon’s Oedipa, craving more.
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