Bret Schneider - Xilinx (2016)

American avant-electronic musician and essayist Bret Schneider holds no institutional allegiance to one artistic medium. His background encompasses a wide range of work experiences and reveals a man who is connected to the world around him in complex, alienated ways. His thoughts on music and philosophy are intertwined into a billowing exposition. But when exploring the dark recesses of his more aural works, there is an inherent flexibility. Phasing percussive elements and frayed droning lines all lead to a perpetually shifting feeling for an aural uncanny. As fractured as his music can be, there is a dim spark of rumination that threads through his synthetic machinations.

On his latest release, “Xilinx,” Schneider taps into a primordial electronic noise—the kind that rests just on your periphery, unwinding itself to reveal myriad sordid circuits and disjointed projections. These tracks maintain a wired mania, expressing an unsettling undercurrent of ragged repetition and warbling drones. There’s an unexpected elasticity to Schneider’s cabled rhythms, and they often shift across several temporal lines before turning inward, struggling to illuminate an intimate dissonance or imagine a multi-chambered core. Displaying a raw and unusually concise knowledge of how these sounds might fit together, “Xilinx” is part zoetrope, part post-industrial dreamscape. It is an inquiry into the idea of internal movement, a contorted experiment in musical patterning, and an experiment in self-replication.