Track of Notes: 1/26/2025
In Flux with one of the great albums no one talks about
Only one track this week because I have a ton of stuff on deck. So, a late and short newsletter; the Wolf's Week special. Anyway, look for a big announcement tomorrow from the Plague Rages mothership. There's also an expansive feature in the work, one in the mold of the brutal death metal list. Busy times, but you won't see that toil for a bit. Anyway, here you go. Enjoy what remains of your weekend.
Flux - “Hollow Spaces”
By 1995, it was time for OLD to be reborn, although James Plotkin didn't see it that way. "I guess it's just a different direction," the future Khanate member, among many other projects, said in a 1996 phoner with KALX Berkeley 90.7 FM. "I don't really know what to say about it — what comes out naturally. I don't sit down and say, 'OK. I'm going to write this horrible rock ballad' or 'I'm going to write this insane freak-out.' It just happens normally and naturally, basically."
Nothing about 1995's Formula is basic, but Plotkin's arrangements and Alan Dubin's vocodered singing are strangely natural for something that sounds so purposefully artificial. (Dubin, of course, would join Plotkin later in Khanate.) OLD's swansong and final album on Earache, the legendarily rapacious label that happily cut the duo loose as soon as it was released, is audaciously unique and nuanced, building up a swarm of guitar textures to create these woozy songs that sound like Brighter Than a Thousand Suns-era Killing Joke hooking up with Yellow Magic Orchestra, getting a remix by Underworld, and then having the resulting 12" played through a byzantine pedal chain with the settings set to "aggressive."
The standout among an album of standouts is "Under Glass," an appropriately glassy pop song that uses a fantastic orchestra-esque loop to create the more techno-adjacent material that My Bloody Valentine flirted with on Loveless. While Plotkin rebuffed the techno comparisons at the time, stating that the only commonality was the use of a 303 on one track, along with mentioning that OLD didn't use sequencing, there's a repetitious quality to "Under Glass" that's hard to ignore. As Adam Neely is fond of saying, repetition legitimizes. Those looping hooks burrow into your brain, and take on new characteristics the more you hear them. And just like those loops, Formula was the start of something, even if it was the end.
A couple of years can change a lot. By the time Flux's Protoplasmic hit the streets, it came via Release Entertainment, the brief experimental noise arm of Relapse Records that was home to projects like co-founder Bill Yurkiewicz's Namanax. (Plotkin worked collaboratively with Yurkiewicz on several Namanax albums, particularly its masterpiece, 1998's Monstrous.) Former Napalm Death drummer and then-current Scorn dubster Mick Harris sat beside Plotkin in the producer chair. Finally, Dubin was out on vocals, essentially retiring from music, and was replaced by graphic designer Ruth Collins, who provided the album's narrative thread.
"I met Ruth through Nick Bullen when we were in Scorn together," Plotkin told Sonic Boom in 1997. "She used to be Nick's old girlfriend. We met at a festival that we were playing in Norway and immediately hit it off. Personally, I think she is such an incredible artist and design person. She did all of the cover art for the Scorn releases; Evanescence, Ellipsis, and Gyral."
The original plan was for Collins to work on Flux as a graphic designer. But that was quickly scuttled. Why? Plotkin, In the same interview: "So when I found out that she could sing, I was floored. I had always wanted to be involved with a project that included female vocals. The softer touch of a feminine voice had a certain appeal to me. I also didn't want a female vocalist to actually sing, but rather just add a sort of narrative element to the music because, at times, my music gets kind of dense, and I didn't want a voice to be fighting the music for control of the song."
The outcome of Plotkin and Collins's collaboration is indeed dense but somehow sparer than its forebear, as if Formula had its skin ripped off. Still, Flux is a brain-spraining spiral of infinite guitar textures that have no start and no end. Like the work of the aforementioned MBV, Protoplasmic's tracks are painstakingly constructed from the ground up, but surprises always surface. Beautiful crashing overtones, glorious melodies, or earwormy rhythms all have the kinetic energy of a dice roll instead of something labored over.
Take "Hollow Senses." "The material on the Flux record has been written for over two years and that track was the worst one when I demoed it," Plotkin said to Sonic Boom. "It really didn't make sense at all, but I recorded it anyways. The one guitar loop that surfaces all the way throughout the track was added at the last moment and it made the track really shine. It added an entire atmosphere to the track that simply wasn't present before. That drastic change was what made it my favorite."
"Hollow Senses" evolves in a way similar to what Pharaoh Overlord would experiment with later during its early forays into kosmische musik. A seed is planted, and soon, as things grow, a full track blooms, adding more elements over time. Collins's cool demeanor is the perfect contrast to Plotkin's busyness, particularly his advanced rhythms that dance around a listener's head while still propelling the song forward by punching and kicking. There's a complexity to "Hollow Senses," but Flux never beats you over the head with it, especially when those clouds of guitars clear, leaving you within the calming eye of the storm.
So, how do these songs take shape? "Usually, when I write a track, I have a starting point in mind," Plotkin explained to Sonic Boom. "That point could be a guitar loop, a bassline, or a piece of percussion. I have the ability, from just hearing a certain element in use, of knowing exactly how I want the rest of the track to sound like. When you record it in the studio, certain things might change a little, but I always know what types of textures I want to use."
And yet, there's something else in there, too, this sense of adventure that's never abated. "It sort of all comes quite naturally, so if I tend to think about it too much, it sort of loses its direction," Plotkin said. "I try to keep it on a really gut level, otherwise the spontaneity will disappear." Hopefully, Protoplasmic will never disappear. Over the nearly 30 years since its release, it continues to grow and grow and grow. Along with Plotkin's sort of solo follow up, The Joy of Disease, it's a cult favorite now. And it all started with a Formula and the desire to move beyond it.
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This album deserves the attention. In my personal top 5 all time. Surprised to see someone else remembers this gem