Running with Safety Scissors

Hard to imagine you could hurt yourself falling on this...it's chilled and liquid and translucent, with wavery washes of synthetic tone and slumping, slouching mechanical beats. The album is called In a Manner of Sleeping, and it's the latest from SF (originally MN) electronic artist Safety Scissors aka Matthew Curry. It's been out since mid-June on Bpitch Control (isn't that Ellen Alien's label?).

Anyway, the track they're pushing has vocals, so just because of that, it is relatively warm and accessible as these things go...but more than that I like how the beat shambles and percolates in a kind of living, organic way..."it's the journey, you will enjoy, when it's over, you'll begin."



So I interviewed Michael Silver from CFCF yesterday and I'll be writing a feature pretty soon for PopMatters, but just to hold you, a) this guy has no formal training in playing, composing, music theory, etc., it's all self-taught (and what he's taught himself is towards the esoteric end: stuff like Philip Glass and Stephen Reich) and b) he is really interested in what he called "derelict technology" that is, sound making techniques that were hyper-modern at one time but now resonate with a very specific, very limited period (like the synths on Peter Gabriel's So). Anyway, interesting stuff, lots to do to get it into feature format.

We're going to see Roger Miller's pre-Burma outfit Sproton Layer tonight at the Flywheel, but I don't think I'm writing about it, at least not anywhere but here.