Bart Trotman, the funkiest DJ/sound maker this side of a Mad Max meets Buckaroo Bonzai dance party (look it up, kids), has dropped his latest Workday/Schoolnight effort entitled, Plastic Ocean (available free here for a limited time).
Invisible’s beat maker gives some details behind the project:
A year and a half ago Workday/Schoolnight stopped being just a recording project when I took it to various venues, houses and apartments around NC. This meant writing songs and organizing sounds based on the equipment I would have with me. All my other Workday/Schoolnight albums were very much a product of the recording process. This new album, “Plastic Ocean”, is a combination of songs written for performance as well as experiments utilizing home recording technology. However, the overall idea here was to record an album that would preserve the themes and songs of the live shows of the past year.
Using roughly 6 different consumer keyboards from the 1980s (casios, yamahas, kawais), a hammond rhythm machine, a bank of drum samples, and dozens of cassette tapes bought from thrift stores (as well as some other stuff), “Plastic Ocean” flows between experimental found sounds and synth-punk songs. Clocking in at over 70 minutes, “Plastic Ocean” keeps the listener tuned in by often times speaking directly to him or her. So, this may not be the best album to listen to while multitasking. The themes of alienation, working, pessimism about the state of the world, and general good ole antiestablishmentarianism found in the sung lyrics are put in an unsettling light when juxtaposed with self-help tapes, self-hypnotic tapes, daily affirmations, and vocabulary lessons
I’m listening as I write this post. Bart wasn’t kidding. I gotta sign off and take it in sans blogging.
Check it out.
UPDATE: Track 17, Affirmations, is killing me.
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