Lauren Bousfield - Salesforce (2023)

An omnivorous composer – gathering inspirations from a wide splattering of genres, styles, and subjects – Lauren Bousfield’s new album Salesforce is the latest creation in her sprawling catalog of highly combustible breakneck pop experimentation. Bousfield, who has been making music both in groups and solo for more than two decades now, counterbalances her craft during her day job as a library music composer and scoring artist with her elegant and obliterated solo work under her name. Her work is characterized by its volatile beat production and breakbeat breakdowns sloshed and smeared with prickly shreds of melody and texture. At their core the songs are highly structured pastiches of modular pop music fragments, and with a tight ear and attention to detail, impressionistic washes of granular jitter are artfully scattered and splattered across the frameworks.

Salesforce is a propulsive venture through a culture that is marked by speed. Microtextures and highly composed moments scream by; the album is blisteringly fast, but with such speed no details are compromised. Grabbing musical ideas from myriad places – jungle, drum and bass, classical piano, new age synth, breakcore glitch, robotic industrial static, and of course pop music – Salesforce is frenetic and refined. A byproduct of a highly homogenized post-consumer compression, the album is littered with details both beautiful and tragic. Baroque microplastic melodies cascade into the strata of tectonic static, WIFI cloud autotune vocals swirl around disembodied and alienated, and braindance ratchet percussion chatters, clicks and blasts through the maelstrom.